Winter's Back, tell a friend!

Today we enjoyed some fresh snow in the meadows at the Dome! There is about 20cm soft new snow over the rain crust. In the alpine, the new snow is wind affected and stiffer, and in some places the crust is exposed at the surface. We saw no new avalanches. Winds today were moderate from the NE, with clear sunny skies and alpine temperatures of -17. Winter’s back! We dug on an east facing slope at 1700m and found 170cm average snow depth. There is 50cm snow over the crust; 10cm soft new snow, and then 40cm wind stiffened snow. The crust is 25cm thick, knife hard, and has some faceting above. Below the crust, we found several layers of pencil (hard) small facets, and then at 80cm deep a layer of 4 Finger (soft) larger facets that go to ground. We did not produce any propagating Extended Column Test (ECT) results but we did produce Compression Test (CT) results with hard taps 50cm deep and 85cm deep. (CT H27 RP down 50cm, CT H27 RP down 85cm on facets 2.0mm).