We toured on the west side of Mount Nebo today from elevations of 6,000 to 9,800 feet, traveling on predominantly west, northwest, and southwest facing slopes. Our initial plan was to head up to the large bowl below the Northwest and Champagne couloirs and try to get a sense of what the snowpack structure was on high elevation terrain on Nebo. When we reached the bowl and saw the large avalanche debris we decided not to go any further and explore other options instead. We did dig a quick pit on a WSW facing slope at 9,200 feet to make sure that there weren't any persistent weak layers hiding under crusts. We found a very strong and consolidated snowpack made up of several crust layers with slightly softer (1F) snow between, but no weak layers at interfaces. HS here was between 180 and 200 cm. This seemed to be deeper than most areas at this aspect and elevation since we were at the bottom of a steeper slope, where new snow pools and is mostly sheltered from the elements. Not far above this we found a pretty shallow and weak snowpack on a similar aspect that is much more exposed to the wind. We did note that the top layer of new snow was sluffing far and fast on the crust beneath it.

Unfortunately we were not really able to get a sense of whether persistent weak layers are still in play on this side of Nebo. We did lots of pole probing and quick hand tests on the way up and found some areas where the snowpack seemed pretty deep and strong and others where there was lots of weak faceted snow. We were mostly in the woods though, and this side of Nebo is filled with blowdown and bushes at the mid elevations and probably does not give a very good representation of what the snowpack is like in higher, more serious terrain.

Photo 1 is of our snowpit, photos 2 and 3 shows the debris from the avalanche.