NE winds on Judah

Our group toured up into the Donner Peak and Mt. Judah zone today, and found 4-6” of light, new snow on the ground. Very light snowfall fell throughout the day, and while the sun made a couple brief appearances, skies were mostly cloudy. Moderate NE winds blew all day, and were blowing the low-density new snow at light to moderate levels in most open areas.

In general, we were slightly surprised by how few signs of wind slab instability we observed on northerly and easterly aspects. 

Skinning up to the east of Lake Mary, we ski cut a number of small test slopes and stepped above our skin track in lots of wind drifts and only saw cracking in one spot (photo 1). When we got to the corniced section of Wildflower Ridge, we could see drifts and loading from the previous SW winds, but these loaded areas also had surface textures indicating effects of the ongoing NE winds (photo 2). Stepping into and ski cutting these loaded areas resulted in only minimal cracking. Skinning along the top, we avoided the larger sections of the cornice, but stepped along some of the smaller “wind-lip” sections and got one double-microwave-sized block to crack off and tumble down below.

We proceeded up the NE Ridge of Mt. Judah, where the upper section of the ridge was scoured and required some of us to boot up the final section of the climb. When we put our skis back on at the top of the ridge, near the “billboards,” we found the deepest wind drifts of our tour along the west side of the ridge. These pockets, loaded from the NE winds, were up to a foot deep and showed some moderate cracking when we stepped above a skin track (photo 3). Right along the ridgeline on the east face, the snow was scoured clean down to the old crust (photo 4). 

From the north summit of Mt. Judah, we skied down the east face and scraped the old crust on just about every turn. The low angle terrain below the east face offered the best turns of the tour, where “wiggle turns” kept us off of the crust. 

As we skinned back up to the Donner-Judah saddle and descended back to the cars, we saw continued blowing snow off of the summit ridge of Mt. Judah, caused by the NE winds, but observed no other significant signs of instability.