WEATHER: High clouds; gusty and swirling winds into the mid-30’s; cold temps; strong solar

SNOWPACK/AVALANCHE OBS: Major wind event above TL yesterday, stripped all windward aspects bare of any recent new snow, and some zones on ridge top got blown down to bare grass and dirt. Raised old ski tracks visible everywhere on ATL SE-W aspects. Small pockets of freshly wind loaded and dense snow cracked and moved on steep E terrain where it was overlying a stout and slick melt freeze surface, but nothing moving further. Despite strong solar radiation, snow surface stayed locked up due to cold ambient air temps and gusty and cold winds at surface, even on steep solar aspects at all elevations.

WEATHER: Mostly clear sky and a really nice day. Calm winds with some light down valley gusts.

SNOWPACK/AVALANCHE OBS: Just a weak facet sandwich out there. Any wind hardened slab that we found was faceted and the snowpack layering just didn’t have the ingredients for a slab problem. Surface Hoar was chilling about 20cm below the snow surface, but again needed some type of slab. Small sloughs where the only instability.

WEATHER: Clear, temps in the teens, strong wind from the north all day.

SNOWPACK/AVALANCHE OBS: Well, I guess we can add wind-hammered to our challenges. The wind was moving snow all day. In the Coney’s area, more southern tilted aspects were loading and developing a stiff crust. By 3PM the windboard was about 2” thick. More northern aspects were scoured and scalloped. HS was no more than 80cm and below the new wind crust was all facets of various sizes. Dug a pit for demonstration purposes and found 3mm DH in the bottom 20cm of the snowpack. All of this said, through the end of the day we saw no signs of instabilities besides small “dinner plates” breaking loose.

WEATHER: Mostly in the trees all day. Looked like mostly clear sky and we obviously couldn’t feel the wind much.

SNOWPACK/AVALANCHE OBS: Old growth timber and mostly treed slopes had nice dense carvey snow with light NSF on top. More open slopes where much more faceted with a deeper and variable ski pen. Sloughing was the only avalanche problem encountered on both of these slope characteristics.

Dug on a north aspect just below ridgeline at 11,400ft. HS 140cm, Jan 11th SH was down 25cm with mostly F+ hard snow on top. Shovel tilt produced easy and clean shears on this interface and CT test had no results. The rest of the snowpack was 4f-1f and faceted. Had no other layers of concern. I thought we mite find a few isolated slopes on the decent with a wind hardened slab over the SH but that wasn’t the case. Maybe somewhere else.

AVALANCHES: Several touchy soft slabs, 4-6″ deep, 15-20 feet wide, running only 20-30 feet, harmless in size, failed above the storm interface. Saw a similar in size natural windslab off of the East shoulder of Mt. Owen. No other signs of instability observed.

WEATHER: Light winds with strong gusts from NW to SW. Periods of moderate snow transport

SNOWPACK: Isolated wind loading just below a leeward, SE facing terrain feature, up to 6″ deep, and some fresh cornice formation up to a foot thick. Otherwise, no wind loading or significant drifting. Could see old snowmobile and ski tracks all nearby bowls.

UPLOADS:

Guide- Jake
Location- Axtell glades
L- 9400-10800
Aspect- NNW

Wx- intermittent snow flurries and upslope wind. Cold, guessing in the 20s (can’t believe that counts as cold these days).

Spx/Avalanche obs- no recent activity noticed by this cowpoke. Anything open with enough of an angle to hit sun was a crustwich on top of facets. A quickie on a NNW open slope at 25 degrees yielded a couple of CTM results under the highest crust, a stout MFC 15 cms thick. Treed and shaded stayed soft.

NAME: Evan
DATE: 15-02-16
LOCATION:Paradise Divide Area
ELEVATION: 9000-11000
ASPECT: NE

WEATHER: Pulses of snowfall only added up to a light dusting. Down valley winds were easily blowing this snow around but it all seemed insignificant in the big picture.

SNOWPACK/AVALANCHE OBS: Didn’t make it to ridgeline, so traveled on open slopes below treeline. SH was down 20-30cm and popped some nice clean hand shares. The slab above has lost a lot of cohesion in the last weeks and didn’t seem concerning in our area. Crusty snow surfaces on slopes less then 25 degrees and previous wind affected surfaces on sub-ridges that jutted out from the terrain. No signs to instability.