You can find just about every snow condition out there since it has been a month since any significant new snow has fallen. We rode all aspects but ended up digging a pit on a 25 degree, northeast facing slope at around 9000 feet. There was a total of 54 inches of very settled snow on the ground. The top 6 inches of the snow is beginning to form facets and has a layer of ¼ inch of surface hoar on top of a thin zipper crust. The rest of the column was one finger to pencil hard down to the bed surface. There is still a layer of weak faceted snow near the ground.

We didn’t get any definite shear failures with the shovel shear test. We did two compression tests, one failed at 13 taps (CT13) and the other failed at 14 taps (CT14). Both failed in the faceted layer of snow at the bed surface. The Extended column tests produced a partial failure down about a foot at 23 hits, it did not propagate and was not clean. We could not get the extended column to fail at all after pounding on the column.

Surface hoar was prevalent on many protected and shady slopes especially in low lying areas.

We rode all aspects of terrain today and found just about every condition other than deep powder… High elevation North facing slopes there was a mixture of sastrugi, wind slab, surface hoar and some decent snow in sheltered areas. High Elevation east facing slopes had some crust and but fairly good snow away from the highest ridgelines. The best riding we found was on west and northwest facing slopes in sheltered areas where we found recrystallized loud powder.

Pictures:

1- ECT test

2- Intact Compression test column

3- Zipper crust

4- Near Surface Facets

5- Bed Surface Facets

6- Surface hoar