Observation: Public

Observation Details

Signs of Unstable Snow

Observations

We walked up the Mt Pilchuck Rd to 1800ft where we were able to start skinning. Our route followed a similar path to the summer road and hiking trail, keeping us primarily on west and north facing terrain, but a little south was covered in the vicinity of our max elevation at about 4600ft.

Snow surfaces began frozen, either breakable1cm MFcr or low density powder on much of what we travelled. By the time we reached south facing slopes around 4200ft there was about 1cm of of softened spring corn over a solid MFcr around 5cm thick- well transitioned into spring conditions.

We saw a few rollerballs and point releases in moist snow, mostly from the last few days. The only slab avalanche we saw was on the west ridge of Pilchuck on a NE aspect, which was hidden, however large debris chunks were visible on the lower angle terrain below (suspected wind slab avalanche, possible cornice trigger). An old D2 wet slide was visible running in a gully to low elevations on the south face of Whitehorse. A glide crack which is very difficult to see in the photo was seen there as well.

A snow pit at 4300ft on a north facing slope yielded several crusts from early March and late February, and aside from those, snow progressively became harder the further we dug down. HS was 415cm. The only significant result was an easy shovel shear on a graupel layer 5cm above the first crust at 25cm down. CTN. There was about 25cm of low density, dry powder on the surface. We found it coating northerly slopes 10-25cm deep above the March 5 crust above ~3000ft.