Observations from Cabin Creek

Today we went back out to Cabin Creek to see how the snow pack was looking prior to the upsoming series of storms. Winds were strong ahead of the storm redistributing and loading snow at most elevations. Wind was also moving snow in what is typically sheltered terrain, leaving small pockets of wind loaded snow in seemingly benign features. Despite the amount of snow being blown around, the slabs were not very stiff in the area we were in and we had a hard time breaking anything loose on test slopes. We had an objective of finding mid elevation, sheltered terrain to see how the persistent problem was holding up, and to track the Dec 17 interface that we have been seeing consistent failures down 15cm on some sort of weak grain, persumably small near crust facets. 

Upon opening the snow, the Dec 11 layer still stands out, and grain formation is still big enough to be able to see with the naked eye. A compression test scored as a CTH SC Q2 @50cm. Grains seemed to be rounding out and gaining strength, but as been mentioned in most observations and forecasts, a bigger load could be the tipping point in the near future. Something we have been itnerested in is tracking the Dec 17 interface which even almost a week after the last storm, still provides consistent failures on tilt tests and some compression tests. What could easily be mistaken as density differences in the upper snowpack, is begining to look more like a weak layer in development. This layer tends to be 15-20cm below the surface, but we have only searched for it on Northerly aspects. We have looked at this layer in multiple locations around the basin, and in some areas we found a distinct crust with small facets, in others, the crust did not exsist, but all have consistent CT and tilt test results producing sudden colapse or sudden planar results. We will be interested to see what happens to this layer when a foot of new snow gets loaded on it.