We did not experience any obvious signs of instability in our travels. In this area, we saw few fresh wind slabs from the last several days of light snowfall. The older, harder wind slabs are hidden beneath the newer storm snow, and we stayed off previously wind-loaded slopes steeper than about 35* because of this.
Calm to lights winds. Some small cornice growth during the last storm. There is some snow available for transport, but today's sun/heat reduced it somewhat.
Saw a few small D1 WL in the Grand Prize area and the Boulders, all in very steep + rocky + wind sheltered + W-SW-S terrain.
Recreation day: lots of pole probing/pokes and few formal snowpit or snowpack test observations.
Surfaces: <5mm SH on many slopes. W-SW-S were moist to wet.
Solar margins (mostly "westish"): crust (2/18) underneath 12-20cm newer snow, FC under that crust. Mixed bag below 2/18 crust with multiple crust+FC layers in some locations, some frozen melt-water/perc columns in the facet sandwich, and no additional crusts in some places.
Pit at 8500'W: HS=155cm, ECTX (only isolated the upper 70cm), 2/18 at 12cm deep. Plenty of FC below 2/18, but no intact crusts at this location.
Shady: Wind crust below HST for 100' vertical below ridgeline at 9200'. FC under 15-25cm HST. Some locations had a faint crust in upper 40cm.
Problem | Location | Distribution | Sensitivity | Size | Comments |
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Layer Depth/Date: 20-50cm Comments: Shaded area indicates where we traveled and would have observed wind slabs. We traveled on a fair amount of exposed ridgeline over 9000', and we did not find any fresh wind slabs of note. When stomping on cornices, the fresh snow would crack or break off in 2-3' wide chunks (no propagation) and did nothing when hitting the slope below the cornices.. The older, larger, harder wind slabs were hidden underneath the newer storm snow on most slopes. We did not get any cracking or collapsing on the few that we traveled on, but I can't speak with any confidence on their distribution or sensitivity. Knowing some of the older hard slabs overlie faceted snow or crusts and facet combinations kept us out of wind-loaded terrain >35*. |
We planned to avoid wind-loaded starting zones steeper than 35*. We skied non-wind-loaded terrain up to about 35*.