Blowing Snow and Variable Surfaces on Judah

NE winds continued to hammer the Mt. Judah area today. We found signs of wind scouring and transport on slopes near and below treeline terrain as soon as we started skinning. Only the most protected north-facing slopes still had soft snow on them. Sastrugi, dense wind-packed snow, and scoured areas surrounded these small patches of soft snow. The wind effects became even more pronounced and widespread as we moved into the more exposed upper elevations. We also found areas where the NE winds had deposited dense slabs of wind-blown snow on the W and NW aspects. We checked out some small slabs. They sounded hollow, but we could not get them to crack with ski kicks. We still avoided larger ones.

We moved back into more sheltered areas and found more variable snow. As we moved between N, NE, E, and SE aspects in sheltered low-elevation areas, we found breakable crusts on the sun-exposed slopes and some soft snow on the shady slopes. We dug into the snowpack in an area likely to preserve surface hoar and found the buried surface hoar layer. We did several tests that targeted the layer without getting unstable results (CT 15 BRK, ECTN 16, ECTN 14).