Incline Lake/Slab Cliffs observations.

We toured the Incline Lake Peak and Slab Cliffs area today looking for wind slabs and surface hoar. All of our travel was in near treeline and below treeline terrain. We saw numerous areas of previously wind affected snow surfaces and wind slabs. For the most part, we avoided areas of well developed wind slab. We saw very minor cracking around the edges of some wind slab areas but did not push hard for failure results. We did travel numerous areas with signs of wind effect on the snow surface but lacked a surface wind slab.

We saw almost no surface hoar in this zone. Where we did see it in small patches in very isolated areas it had already been knocked over/destroyed by wind.

The snow surface in wind protected areas in this zone consisted of minimally developed near surface facets, much less developed than what has been observed along the Sierra Crest in recent days.

We encountered mostly light to moderate winds along the ridgetops with only the occasional sighting of blowing snow.