Steamboat & Flat Tops

Snowpack

Jason Konigsberg, Eric Deering · Mar 20, 2018 · Steamboat & Flat Tops

Weather

We traveled below to near treeline. Winds were calm and no wind loading was observed. Skies were obscured for most of the day and temperatures remained cold.

Snowpack

The snowpack in the Buffalo Pass area is over 2 meters deep on shady slopes. Basal weak layers were never that weak in this area and with the strong mid and upper pack any weak snow near the ground would be extremely difficult to affect. On these northerly slopes, older buried surface hoar layer, from January, were visible in our snowpit but hardness differences were minimal and these layer are unreactive. In the upper snowpack a thin crust from warm temperatures last week sits below a layer of graupel and a very soft storm slab ob about 40 cms. As the slab is extremely soft, snowpack tests did not show anything concerning around this crust. A future large load on top of this crust may be worth watching.---On southerly slopes, the new snow is bonded well to the melt-freeze crust that formed before the last storm. The only layer of concern was a thin crust, about 4 to 6 inches down, that is poorly bonded to new snow. Shooting cracks and very small avalanches were triggered on this layer.