Hunting for instability

Quick report

Weather

warm, stormy, windy, sunny

Ride Type

mellowSlopes, denseTrees, openTrees

Stayed Away

alpineSlopes, steepSlopes

Snow Conditions

powder, windAffected

Avalanche Conditions

avalancheConditionSnow, avalancheConditionSound

AST1 Snowshoe day in Mt Speiker area today. We stayed in low angle and simple terrain, and we didn't see any signs of instability where we were. In the am we could see lots of wind transport on ridge tops, and very recent small slides on NE aspects below cornices. Our pit showed only 10 cm new snow over a very hard layer of pencil snow 40 cm thick. Below that was facets to ground. Total HS was 160 cm. We saw failures in the moderate range in facets down 50 and 55 cm, and in the hard range down 25 cm in compression tests, but no propagation on any layer in ECT tests. The snowpack was more stable than expected at treeline, but we didn't wander into any bigger terrain as a result. It began snowing pretty hard (S2, SW wind) in the early afternoon. The three turns we got were pretty good though!