Date of Observation: 01/30/2023
Zone: Southeast Mountains
Route Description: A few laps on the North-Easterly lines of Snodgrass, accessed via Gothic Road skin track
Observed avalanche activity: Yes
Avalanches: All localized sluffs and small crowns, confined to storm snow-old snow interfaces only on the steepest of rollovers
Weather: Snowing hard all day, temps were pretty cold outside of denser stands of trees; the sun came through the clouds for about an hour midday; often still/subtly breezy, but there were frequent gusts around 25 mph throughout the day.
Snowpack: Pit @ ~9900 ft, NE aspect, 28* slope angle
Snow height at pit 155 cm
ECTN 7 @ 135 cm, storm snow-old snow interface, and with progressive loading to 30, ECT X. Moderately aggressive prying resulted in a non-planar break at 95 cm on what appeared to be an old sun crust that had just started to decompose before it was buried.
The top meter of snow ramped up in hardness from F for the top 20 cm to 4F for roughly another 30 cm to 1F for the remaining 50 cm, with no obvious weak layers detected.