Corn window widening across the solar aspects.

We toured Silver Peak this morning with two data collection goals. We looked at near surface faceting on shaded northerly aspects. We investigated how much significant surface wet snow formation is expanding out to easterly aspects as the sun angle increases.

Near surface faceting was widespread in open wind protected avalanche terrain below treeline as has been observed in many other locations. We also noted a fair amount of near surface faceting in near treeline terrain with substantially less wind protection. We dug a snowpit in a near treeline, NE wind sheltered avalanche path along our approach to add to our mapping of this potential future weak layer. An old crown and some old debris were still visible in this path from the Jan 3-4 wind slab avalanche cycle.

Moving over to solar aspects and up to our highpoint of travel around 8,200' we noted that the aspect window for corn snow at 8,000' is widening. As the sun angle has increased over the past several weeks, the aspect window has widened from a 90 degree or less window across SE-S-SW aspects to a nearly 130 degree window across ESE-SE-S-SW-WSW aspects. True E aspect terrain still holds too thin of a surface melt layer for quality corn snow in most locations.