Observation: Public

Observation Details

Signs of Unstable Snow

Observations

Encouraged by what we'd seen Friday, we decided to venture over to Red.

Snow conditions were varied -- crusty in the trees, quite nice and dry on fully-shaded open slopes. A travel note: There is presently a very nice snow-covered log just upstream of the Commonwealth Creek bridge.

We were a little surprised to find that the southern gully that the Red ascent-route must cross had an old avalanche that was large-enough to have crossed the Lundin branch of Commonwealth Creek and ascended the other side a little, clearing trees.

Ski crampons were handy on the ascent to Red's bench with Lundin. Sunny slopes held various forms of sun-affected snow -- moist/breakable/etc.

Ascending Red's WSW slopes proved more-challenging than anticipated. 5-10cm of dry snow glopped badly in the morning light/heat. Transitioning to booting yielded an interesting surprise. In many places, the apparently-firm crust was unsupportable, yielding boot-penetration well above the knee. In other places, the crust was scoured and sun-processed into snow hard-enough to make booting begin to become tenuous.

With clearly-variable conditions and some concern that the S-facing exit-traverse would become soft, we turned tail and skied at noon from mid-height on the WSW slope. Skiing was variable, making for slow/blocky turns, but the crust was always edgeable.

Descending into Commonwealth was fine and straightforward -- we were not too late there. We found that the E side of Red's ascent ridgelet also held an old slide that had cleared timber and trapped branches uphill of every trunk. The new snow has begun to smooth out the avalanche-debris.

The day's warmth caused localized showers beneath each tree. Emerging at the bridge, we were rather wet.

Descending the luge-track was fun, but caution was required for the substantial volume of snowshoers out enjoying the day.

Back to the car fairly early, we skinned a couple of laps at West. Photos of Red show that a party of two managed to skin where we could not, then extended the booter to the summit. The descent sluffed loose-wet down the center of the slope -- as always, in these popular places, care is required from those above and below.

Images CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
Captions:
1: Newly-cleared trees from a Red Mountain slide that crossed the Lundin branch of Commonwealth Creek.
2: Red Mountain 14:46
3: Red Mountain 15:36
4: Skier-triggered loose-wet sluff on Snoqualmie Mountain's south side.