Variability on Castle Peak

A thin melt freeze crust existed on all aspects that had snow cover on Castle Peak today. Repeated hand pits and probing with ski poles showed layers of weaker faceted snow in the bottom half of the snowpack. Observations on these layers also indicated that they are gaining strength. In most places snow from these layers would clump together and was easy to make a snowball out of. One location showed repeatable unstable snowpit test results. Compared to tests done in a similar spot last week, these tests indicated a slight strengthening trend. In the other 5 locations where we performed ECT tests between 8000 and 8800 ft on N-NW aspects, the tests indicated that even if the weak layers break the resulting fracture would not travel very far. In fact a pit about 15 ft away from the snowpit that yeilded the unstable results did not reveal any signs of snowpack instability (see attached snowpits).