Eric and Amy Flygare

Logan » Logan River » Tony Grove

Tony Grove

We rode in the Tony Grove area today. We found great settled powder riding above 8000 feet on aspects facing North through East. We noticed sun crusts on any aspect that was facing the southern half of the compass.

We were concerned about the stability so we slope cut 10-15 test slopes before hopping on any bigger slopes. Hard slope cuts and jumping on small test slopes did not show any signs of moving even when cutting right above recent tracks. We looked around the Tony Grove area and didn’t notice any avalanches even though many steep slopes had been hammered over the weekend. We did all our pit tests on a 34 degree Northeast facing slope at around 9100 feet, with a total snow depth of only 45 inches. Our pit tests gave us a Q2 shear failure about 8 inches down on top of an old ice/rime layer. And another Q2 shear failure down about 20 inches on the interface between the November snow and the Christmas storm snow. Compression tests failed on 11 taps (CT11) 8 inches down and another CT test failure at 18 taps (CT18) down 20 inches. The Extended Column Tests produce a partial propagation at 14 taps (ECTN14) at the 8 inch layer and an ECTN22 and the 20 inch layer (Second picture below). It was hard to tell what the weak layer was. I couldn’t see any buried surface hoar above the rime crust, maybe it was just shearing on the slick bed surface. The failures on the Nov/Dec interface didn’t show significant facets. Most of the snowpack was well rounded snow but you could see some old rounding facets mixed in the snowpack.

As we were leaving the wind was picking up and there was some snow being transported over the ridgetops but the majority of the snow is pretty dense and was not moving a whole lot.

Moderate

Moderate