Observation: Cutler Ridge

The top 15cm of the snowpack was damp, trending wet, sitting atop ~40cm of damp facets mixed in with graupel layers. By our exit in the mid-afternoon around 15:00, near 8000', our skis were sinking more than 30cm into the wet, heavy snow, punching into the facets. Steeper slopes had new roller balls in addition to the old, refrozen ones from earlier in this warmer period. We saw evidence of wet slides in recent days on steep solar slopes, up to D2—big enough to bury a person—in size. See one avalanche we snapped a photo of here.

The setup we saw today reminded me of the weird and wet structure we had going into the series of storms around Christmas that buried the CERC and the weak, wet facets below it. While the slab of new snow is just 4F on top of the F hard Dry January Layer (DJL) layer of weak facets, the facets are damp to wet—and wet facets do weird things.

While in a pit, we got a somewhat surprising ECTP3 (see video below), indicating that propagation on the DJL is very likely with easy force. However, when we repeated the test four more times, we couldn't get the column to propagate at all (ECTN), just having it break near the top of the DJL. While there are layers of graupel from the earlier, small storms in February, they are less pronounced and more mixed in than other areas. This being said, the breaks and single propagation ran on a a layer that had graupel mixed in with FCs.

These test results simply show the irregularity with the snowpack this year, and how high our uncertainty should be heading in to the storm arriving tonight. This wet, warm, and weird setup is going to be a bit of a puzzle in how exactly it reacts to a sizeable loading event. May we be lucky enough to find out.