Avalanches: Noticed one avalanche between Mt treasure and Treasury that likely occurred during the natural cycle that happened during the week of 11/16. U-N-R2-D2-I. Wind loaded bowl on an East aspect at about 13,000ft.
Weather: Partly cloudy skys in the morning gave way to few clouds by mid-day. Ridgetop winds were light from the West. Temperatures felt sightly cooler then the previous days with snow surfaces on southerly slopes staying frozen or dry.
Snowpack: Steep Southerly slopes had a wafer thin crust from yesterdays warm temps and those snow surfaces remained frozen today. Most alpine northerly and westerly slopes were put through the sand blaster during the last wind event. Easterly and Southerly alpine slopes vary from nice creamy textured surfaces to firm hardslabs and windboard. No instabilities were observed while traveling but one snowpit on an easterly slope produced a propagating test result with the persistent slab that started forming on 11/16. Pit attached below.

U-N-R2-D2-I. Natural avalanche that likely occurred during the week of 11/16. Located between Mt Treasure and Treasury.

11.24.15

Avalanches: None witnessed.

Weather: Calm, clear and rather warm. 42 Farenheit at Kebler trailhead
Snowpack: Dug two pits around 11,600 feet in the basin between Purple and Owen.

First pit dug on ENE aspect. HS=60 cm. From the bottom, there was around 5cm of 1-3 mm facets with a deteriorating crust above, topped by 40 cm of 1mm and Fist hardness grains. This was topped by 10 cm of 4f windslab and capped with 5 cm of 1f/p wind crust. Crust either gave no penetration or in shallower areas your boot went all the way to the ground.

Snowpit 1

Snowpit 2

Avalanches: Snow collapsed and avalanche was triggered from below while we were skinning. No burials or injuries. No one was caught.Best estimates are 100′ wide, 300 or 400′ in running length. Possibly D2. We never saw the crown up close, but estimate it was around 3-feet deep on average.
Weather: Sunny, light wind from SW.
Snowpack: Below 12,000′ on the south-facing aspect was a mixture of some occasional wind slab mixed in-between snow that was virtually spring-like – upper layers that were turning into rounds. Above 12,000′ was windslab or soft slabs on top of facets.

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Avalanches: No signs of instability observed across multiple slopes and aspects.
Weather: Few to scattered thin clouds. Light west winds. Mild temps.
Snowpack: Traveled across a variety of aspects above and below treeline to observe current snow surface. South aspects became moist yesterday at all elevations. Surfaces are quite firm above treeline and weak below treeline, consisting of:
-Pencil hard melt-freeze crusts (11/16 crust exposed due to scouring) on scoured south or southeast aspects ATL
-1F or pencil hard, small grained, wind packed rounds (wind board or old windslabs) on all aspects ATL, anywhere that winds had drifted or deposited snow, especially in gullies or rollovers ATL. This is the predominant snow surface above treeline right now.
-4F faceting sastrugi on scoured features on all aspects ATL. Became moist on southerly aspects.
-Fist hard 1 to 1.5 mm facets make up the entire snowpack on shaded aspects below treeline, with some decomposing graupel at the surface. Snow depth was less than 12″ BTL.

Weather: Not a lick of wind and warmer temps with stronger solar then the previous day.
Snowpack: Traveld through many different slopes in the upper OBJ drainage while simply probing for snowpack structure. Strong over weak structure would be very obvious in one location while 15ft to the side the layering would be much more uniform. This widely variable snowpack structure could be found on all slopes traveled, E, SE, NW, NE and elevations above. Collapsing was felt on many of these slopes, mostly while traveling over the slab margins. Though no natural or recent avalanche activity could be found in the area. So Persistent slab structure existed and could be found on the aspects traveled above, but the avalanche problem seemed to be very stubborn. Last weeks strong wind events largely lead to this variable snowpack structure. With the same slope being striped down to say, 40cm in one area and loaded with a hard slab over weaker facets say, 100cm deep only 15ft away from the shallower area.

Avalanches: 11/21/15 “we watched two skiers skin up and set this off early afternoon. The two skiers are visible at the top of the slide in this pic (barely). (no other information was provided, but if you look hard you can make out the old crown of the slide triggered early november just to the looker’s right of this slide -fx’r note)

Baldy slide (pic taken from CBAC facebook page)