Steamboat & Flat Tops

Avalanche

Ben Pritchett · Jan 29, 2020 · Steamboat & Flat Tops

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Weather

Socked in clouds with mostly poor visibility, light snow, light winds. Clouds began to lift around 3pm, with a moments of improved light, but still grey-bird.

Snowpack

Generally a deep strong snowpack. Probing showed a pretty consistent 175-190 deep blanket of mostly pencil-hard snow with some recent snow on top. We found two shallowly buried non-persistent weak layers in the upper snowpack, identifiable with a tilt test, but not problematic in the wind-sheltered terrain we observed. Maybe there's a chance for some small fresh wind-slabs up high, but we never got any visibility to confirm or deny if that was the case. Below about 40cm down, the snowpack was mostly pencil hard. Old buried near surface facet layers were visible at 40, 65 and 80 cm down, but none propagated a crack in tests.

Avalanche

None observed.