Steamboat & Flat Tops

Snowpack

Mike Cooperstein, Jason Konigsberg · Feb 25, 2017 · Steamboat & Flat Tops

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Weather

Mostly cloudy to overcast. Temperatures remained cold for the entire day. Winds below treeline were calm. It snowed S-1 to S-2 at times in the afternoon.

Snowpack

Snowpack below treeline is about 150cm deep. The top 30cm is fist hard new snow. We found multiple crusts in the top 50cm of the snowpack. On northerly aspects we found a layer of small, well developed near-surface faceted crystals buried about 50cm from the surface. This layer was reactive to snowpack tests and produced multiple easy to moderate ECT's with propagating fractures...The recent storm snow of the last few days, which amounts to about 12 inches, has bonded well to underlying crusts. We did not observe any significant instabilities within the storm slab.