We rode in the Northern Bear River Range today and found a great consolidated snowpack for riding. We did not notice any red flag warning signs throughout the day. There was around 6 inches of fresh snow since Sunday which freshened things up nicely. We did notice a little bit of rime on the upper elevation trees and we found a very thin layer of rime on the snow surface on the high ridges of the front range.

We dug several avalanche pits to see what the snow structure is looking like. The first pit was dug on a northeast facing, 35 degree slope, at around 8800 feet elevation. The overall snowpack depth in this pit was 65 inches. A shovel shear test did not produce any energetic failures. I did get compression failures at 17 taps at about 8 inches down, another compression test failure at 23 taps, 20 inches down at the interface between the old November snow and the storm snow from last week. And a final compression test failure at 27 taps down about 16 inches from the ground. The extended column test did not produce any failures even after pounding on the column more than 30 times (see picture)

The second pit was dug on a southeast facing, 23 degree slope, at around 8600 feet elevation. A total snow depth of 38 inches was observed in this location. Compression tests both failed a 21 taps, 18 inches from the surface at the interface between the old November snow and the new snow from last week. The weak layer was an obvious layer of faceted snow just underneath an ice crust from prior to last week's storms. The extended column test failed on the same layer at around 30 taps. It did not pop out and was difficult to tell if it actually failed at 30 taps or not. Definitely not an energetic failure.