Like skiing in the Front Range

Date of Observation: 11/07/2022
Name: Zach Guy

Zone: Northwest Mountains
Route Description: Toured into Peeler Basin and upper Oh-Be-Joyful Basin from Lake Irwin, traveling on various aspects up to 12,000′

Observed avalanche activity: No
Avalanches: Just some rollerballs on southerly aspects today.
Weather: Mild, few clouds, light to moderate SW winds.
Snowpack: Shallow and wind hammered sums it up. Traveled mostly near and above treeline, where its tough to find snow surfaces softer than 4F, except for random patches of unsupportive facets. Last weekend’s winds did some damage, with lots of erosion from W to NW winds. The snowpack is weakest on N and NW slopes, but generally lacks a slab except for isolated pockets of deeper crossloading. Surfaces on those slopes were stiff wind crusts or softer sastrugi, with faceting through much of the snowpack. The east quadrant held recently drifted snow up 1F hard, highly variable in slab thicknesses up to at least 18″. Kind of spooky to travel on because it wasn’t always obvious if you were on a stiff slab or just a firm wind crust without some digging. Stability tests on east aspects produced moderate propagating results on the 11/3 interface (a faceted crust), though we observed no signs of instability on the slopes that we traveled. I avoided approaching some of the meatiest looking drifts for fear of remote triggering or getting tangled in a stiffer slab. Southerly aspects were getting cooked into what will be a supportive crust tomorrow.
The thin ice crust described in previous obs was also present near the snow surface in some areas; it appeared to be formed by a riming event in this area – generally present only on terrain windward to southwest flow, up to ridgetop. It was on the south side of Scarp Ridge, in a few spots in Peeler, and absent in OBJ.