Observation: Public

Observation Details

Signs of Unstable Snow

Observations

Had a lovely day at Stevens today. Snowing hard when we arrived at 8 am, tapering off throughout the day. Light to nil wind with no signs of transport.

Temps were brisk for this time of year, with my thermometer showing 23 degrees throughout most of the day. The snow was light and skiing was good where coverage was adequate.

Snowpack was generally 40-50cm of fresh snow on top of dirt. Most of the in-bounds terrain at the resort is still unskiable, accept a few of the more manicured run-cuts underneath Skyline, Brooks, and Hogsback chairs. With a good number of parties out today, these were starting to get tracked out in places.

Later in the afternoon, we headed over the shoulder of Cowboy Mountain to its south slopes. These steep slopes had pretty minimal coverage and were mostly unskiable except for a few spots where one could link a handful of nice turns. A pit at ~5,000 feet on the SSW aspect of Cowboy (.3 mi WSW of the summit) showed 40 cm of new snow very well bonded to just a few cm of pencil-hard refrozen rain crust. I was unable to get the snowpack to fail on the rain-crust interface. The storm snow was generally right side up, with no signs of slab formation and two very poorly defined inter-storm layers.