For the first time in a long while, will not identify an "avalanche problem" with an observation. Poor snow structure still exists, and will likely persist through much of the remainder of the winter. No detailed pits today - just lots of quick hand pits and pole probes to get a sense of the snow structure up to 9900' in Maybird. However, over the past 7 days all the snow I've looked at in both BCC and LCC shows a stout, rightside-up 4F/1F slab on top of persistent faceted layer that is over a meter below the snow surface. Several probes today were showing weaker snow buried roughly 120 cms below snow surface. Pits from this past week were showing little to no energy in slab on top, and weak layers continuing to gain strength through compression and eliminating the temperature gradient. (Bruce had a nice video describing this.)
Was finding some old wind deposits from winds this past week, but they were not sensitive to tests with ski cuts.
The only "hazard" I could find today was easy sluffing in the top 3-5 cms of light-density snow. Ski cuts on steeper slopes could get sluffs to move quite easily.
One interesting thing I did find today was some faceted snow underneath the temperature/rain crust that occurred during the rain and warm temps from about Feb 13-15. This layer is elevation dependent, but below about 9000' it is 1 cm thick in places, and is buried roughly 20-40 cms (8-16") below the snow surface. It is not uncommon to find faceting just underneath crusts, and it is something that I'll pay attention to over the next week.
Did ski a few steeper pitches today on NE aspects. Made sure the slope was not wind loaded and was supported from below.
Excellent ski and travel conditions remain - unfortunate we are facing yet another warm-up in the short term.
Not-so-good photo shows sluffing from ski cuts on steeper test slopes.
Forecaster Comments: Another 5 star observation by Greg Gagne. If his day job wasn't at Westminster college, I suspect he'd put a few of us out of a job here at the UAC. - Hardesty