Observation: NWAC Forecaster

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Weather Summary

Hot in sun, cold in shade. A solid freeze happened last night.

Snowpack Observations

This was a typical spring day. Sunny slopes were moist to wet about a foot deep, in some areas more, breaking down the surface crust.

Before the intense sun softened the crust, they varied depending on aspect and elevation. Most surfaces aside from a tiny slice of north above ~5000ft had some amount of crust. In more direct-to-the-sun locations the crust was hard and supportable on foot, and on the periphery of the more intense sunny slopes crusts were thinner and breakable. This was near and above treeline. Below treeline was very crust everywhere.

Traveling on north-facing shady slopes we found low density dry surface snow which was obviously faceted without even having to take out a magnifier. We found a few locations without any crust near the surface, but where we dug I found a thin, weak 1cm crust 3cm down, beneath the faceted surface snow. Other than the small crust near the surface, we didn’t find any crusts and the snowpack was right-side up. The layers were all dry. We didn’t get any results in pit tests.

We didn’t see any new avalanches, although we saw large glide cracks in the distance on a very steep, rocky north-facing slope. One of these appeared to have avalanched, it is unknown when. There were signs of small and large wet loose avalanches although we didn’t see any new ones while we were out.

Cornices were huge and we stayed far away from them.