Cloudy day at Blue Lakes

The day started out sunny and warm, with thin, high clouds. This provided good views of recently wind loaded terrain, where we did not see any recent avalanche activity (pic 1). By mid-morning, cloud cover increased and warmed temps by "green housing." Eventually, cloud cover became dense enough to result in cooling (pic 2, looking at Da-ek Dow Go-et Mountain on the left, and sunny Monitor Pass in the background to the right). Light snow showers began around 3pm.

We hammered test slopes sheltered from the wind and did not see evidence of lingering storm instabilities. Small wind loaded features (pic 3 - note the mini cornice is drooping) also did not show signs of instability via slope cuts and ECTs, though shovel tilts still revealed two planar interfaces on these wind loaded features (pic 4). 

The deep facets were clumping together upon removal from a snomo trench (pic 5), and very easy to press together by hand. Surface hoar was observed on open terrain from the Hope Valley sno-park to our high point of 8800ft (pic 6). When we left at 3pm, it was still intact on features receiving indirect sun, but appeared to have been destroyed on warmer features.