While skiing around the Laurel Peak and Gold Basin areas on Saturday my partner and I experienced around 4 or 5 large collapses while touring. I’ve never felt collapsing during such warm weather, so I got a little curious and we decided to dig a pit.

We found that while the top 30cm’s of snow was fully rounded and rapidly melting, there was an ice layer about 30-40 centimeters down where the meltwater from the upper snowpack was pooling up. Just beneath the ice layer there was a 4finger/fist layer of rounding facets. We got an ECT-P 14 that failed on the facets just below the ice layer.

It seems like a few more days of melting, percolation, and re-freezing are needed before North and West facing aspects are confidently good to go. The riding was excellent on south aspects right around 12:45pm.