Wind Loading

Collapsing

Poor Snowpack Structure

Two snowpack obs. I found worth noting today while touring off the West Desolation Ridge and Millcreek - Mill D North divide 1) There is a good deal of weak snow on the ground still in repeater path starting zones. Slopes are proving to be unreacitve to skiers perhaps due to a lack of snow weight in relation to the strength of the slab and/or an obscuring of the weak layer interface. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a player again with a large load, my bet is that it would be on repeater slopes along the Millcreek and PC ridges. 2) I had three separate collapses today on the wind-loaded north ridge of peak 9467' (east of Little Water peak). To the best I could tell these were happening on buried near surface facets down about 30cm. Another group I ran into on Little Water Peak confirmed the same layer reactive in pit results in Big Water Gulch. It seems that this nsf layer is only reactive with enough weight on top of it such as in areas loaded during the epic wind last week. The BCC-millcreek-pc ridge areas seem the most suspect as this layer seems to be most pronounced here.