Steamboat & Flat Tops
AvalancheKreston Rohrig · Jan 12, 2019 · Steamboat & Flat Tops
Weather
Nice day with a few lingering clouds and barely a whisper of wind.
Snowpack
A strong and deep snowpack is the best way to describe it. We dug a large trench for an avalanche awareness class on a north facing slope around 9500'. The most interesting observation was two layers of buried surface hoar 30cm down and 65cm down from the top. Total snowpack height was 165cm. Remarkably, neither of these layers had propagating results in ECTs during several tests. In the upper layer, the surface hoar was laid over and the best result we got was ECTN 11 & 14. The lower Surface hoar was well preserved but had started to bond to layers above and below and wouldn't budge, even with heavy persuasion. Other than that, the snowpack was comprised of thick slabs of 1F to P hard layers.
Avalanche
None observed