Steamboat & Flat Tops

Snowpack

Austin DiVesta Dylan Craaybeek · Feb 12, 2022 · Steamboat & Flat Tops

Weather

Partly cloud this morning, but clouds quickly gave way to blue skies and sunny conditions for the rest of the day. Temperatures were mild with calm winds.

Snowpack

The snowpack around the Black Mountian area is shallower than the rest, especially around lower elevations. You can find bushes and trees in lower elevations still sticking around because the trailhead elevation is around 6500ft. These lower elevation low-angle terrain help crusts from the sun. Anything steeper than about 35 degrees starts to have a cohesionless upper portion of the snowpack. When you step out of a track into untracked snow, you immediately are riding through breakable crusts. Once you get into higher elevation terrain, the snow softens up slightly. Still, it presents with breakable crust with weaker snow right below. From a handful of quick snowpits observations, we noticed a couple of crusts in the upper portion of the snowpack that sits on top of strong ( 1 Finger to Pencil hard) slabs. On a west-facing slope, we did notice that we do have a basal layer of facets that were 2mm in size that had started to cup; on anything with a southerly tilt, there was more of a basal ice layer. We did not see any propagation results in the snowpits we dug. What will cause a problem later in the upper portion of the snowpack once you get more of a load. While we did not get on any slopes facing north or east, we suspect they have that basal layer of facets that is slightly more well developed.