Winds on Pre-Laurel Peak: N 5-10 Temp 16° Percent of Normal: 96%

We should see a little bit of everything today. Look for lingering clouds this morning as the southern trough tracks eastward. Skies should clear and become mostly sunny by mid-morning. By afternoon, a weak shortwave dropping down from the northwest should bring more clouds, winds from the north increasing to 15-20 mph, and a slight chance for some flurries. High temps at 10,000' will be in the upper 20's. The weekend looks dry and sunny with a return to an unsettled pattern next week.

We've had to learn to be happy with a little this season, and 3" of new snow will freshen things up a bit, especially on sheltered, northerly aspects where conditions were already pretty good. Winds over the past few days have been generally calm, and slabs of drifted snow that formed that formed during the Sunday-Monday period are largely stuck in place. The exception will be areas where drifted slabs exist over collapsible weak layers higher up in the snowpack. You are most likely to find this problem on northerly aspects, and the only way to know if a weak layer exists is to dig down a foot or two.

And finally, deep drifts formed over the weekend have added stress to a persistent weak layer (PWL) of faceted snow near the base of the snowpack. We are uncertain to what degree this load has affected the PWL, and we've been wrestling with how to quantify the likelihood of triggering a deep avalanche for some time now. For more details on that see my recent blog post. The bottom line is that Dave and I are continuing to avoid big, steep, northerly facing slopes.