Observation: Mt Olympus

Mason Hulsberg

Salt Lake » Mt Olympus

Mount Olympus East

I am nowhere near an expert on snow conditions, but I figured I should put this up. I was hiking up the east side of Olympus from Neff’s Canyon. The whole snowpack below about 7,800 feet is fresh and loose from the Jan 8 cold storm, but as I started to go up the chute, I noticed that my feet were breaking a crust below me. I did my best attempt at a hand pit; it was at 8,200 feet, east facing. Snowpack was about 1’ deep. There was about 8” of fist-push snow on top of an icy crust about 1-2” off the ground. I later went all the way up the chute to 8,700 feet on the same aspect and was trying to push through a 3’ snowpack with a similar crust. My guess is the crust came from the Christmas Eve rain on the little bit of snow that was still up there. I did not see any major red flags of instability, and I was able to slide down the whole chute without any problems.

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