Observation: NWAC Forecaster

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Weather Summary

Foggy/cloudy down low but broke out of the clouds a few towers up Chair 2 into mostly sunny skies. There were some high clouds coming in from the NW and the accompanying wind was a bit stronger than anticipated and was quite chilly.

Avalanche Observation Comments:

No new real avalanches were observed. There was plenty of snow that had shed from trees and rocks, some even gathered additional snow to fan out into what some could categorize as Loose avalanches. They were not big enough in my opinion to be categorized as an avalanche of consequence.

Snowpack Observations

I dug 5 pits on different aspects at a few different elevations around Alpental looking at the 12/8 interface. I found that it was generally around a foot below the surface and would show up with shovel shear tests, compression tests (hard), and extended column tests (hard). It was difficult to get a good sample of the grains onto the card, but when I did, it looked to be a mix of breaking down surface hoar and preserved stellars. If you look directly at the block, the grains looked a lot more upright, sparkly, and unstable. Call the grains what you want, the takeaway is that we are still getting some failures on this layer multiple days after the loading event, which is a bit uncommon round these here parts. I performed ECTs in 4 out of my 5 pits and in only one did the failure propagate across the block (ECTP28). It was a bit irrigular and actually failed on a lower layer (12/5?) than what I had been expecting.

Other than that, the wind was a bit stronger (and colder) than I had expected. It was moving a little snow around, but probably not enough to build new Wind Slabs. I skied up along the base of some cliffs a few times in wind-loaded pockets and got a few blocks to pop, but no actual Wind Slabs.