Headed out for a tour out of White Pine to check out the mid-elevation terrain before the next storm system. We know that the Upper Cottonwoods have been hammered by the last few storms, leading to an impressive snowpack depth. The primary areas we still have questions about are those that have received a bit less snow, and therefore have a bit thinner slab sitting atop the weak faceted grains that we know blanket the entire Wasatch.

Upon arriving at the trailhead it was lightly snowing, with the rain line being just below the white pine trailhead. The snowfall was warm and damp. Throughout the afternoon the winds continued to pick up, transporting more snow to the upper reaches of Red Pine Trees. We traveled up White Pine, to Red Pine, and up into Red Pine trees. Throughout the tour, we noted many areas that had been heavily wind-loaded over the past few days, but we did not get any obvious red flags like cracking and collapsing. Even on steep-loaded wind features. We were hoping to find a snowpack representative of shallower zones across the Wasatch. That proved challenging to find, in most places we probed we found snow depths between 2-3M of snow. Even out of the wind-loaded terrain.

On one slope, that appeared to be a bit more scoured we were able to find a snowpack depth of 169 on a north-facing aspect. Within that pit, we still found a poor snowpack structure, with weak grains within the bottom half of the snowpack but the well-developed facets from November covering the bottom 50 cm of the snowpack. Even with a poor snowpack structure, we were unable to get propagation within the facets, and unable to get a repeatable propagation within a graupel layer higher in the snowpack.

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