A look at some of the low elevation buried surface hoar, close to a slide that was triggered remotely on Friday the 27th, a day when at least 4 slides were triggered on surface hoar in the Park City area mountains. An ECT of 11 shows little strengthening of the weak layer. The large grain size of the surface hoar when it was buried will probably be a factor in even slower than normal strengthening of this layer, which would be slow anyway. The lower pack had various layers and crusts that all seemed well bonded all the way to the ground.

Lower photo is a back-lit thin slice of the snowpit wall - this is about as good as it gets for seeing a cool weak layer we don't get too often in the central Wasatch mountains. Normally, wind and/or warmth destroy most of our surface hoar before it gets buried.

Photo below is the bed surface of the near by slide - it's just littered with laid down surface hoar, very visible to the eye.

The current snow surface is weakening - small surface hoar and near surface faceting in places, a potential weak layer. But it's still another few days til the next storm, though, so hopefully we'll have wind and/or warmth to destroy most of this.