Large Cornices and New snow on Tamarack Peak

During our tour we observed continuous light snowfall and steady winds. While skinning up, our pole plants, probes, and handpits indicated a right-side-up snowpack (soft cold snow sitting on top of more dense snow) on the sheltered slopes. Snowpit tests on sheltered slopes also showed a right-side-up snowpack and did not reveal any obvious signs of instability.

Once we got into the higher elevations, some clearing occurred and visibility improved enough for us to see large cornices looming over wind-loaded slopes. We could also see what looked like mostly buried debris or chunks of cornice below one of larger avalanche prone slopes. We found some small wind-loaded test slopes and ski cuts and kicks on most of these only produced small cracking after the slope was already undercut. Some cracking did occur on the steepest of these small test slopes without it being undercut. The small cornices above the test slopes were fragile and easy to break but when they fell onto the wind-loaded slopes below them they did not trigger any wind slab failures. The did cause some minor sluffing. The winds did seem to shift more to the NE after noon with some signs light NE wind scouring along some test slopes on the far east ridge of Tamarack by 1 pm.