Variable Conditions on N aspects - Corn on S aspects

We found a wide variety of conditions on our tour. During the skin out Chickadee Ridge conditions remained firm. On the more north-facing slopes, we encountered a mix of firm snow, breakable crusts, and some isolated areas of shallow softer weak surface snow (facets). This weaker surface snow is not well developed in this area. Still, we decided to set up a snowpit test to monitor this layer and to try to see how it might handle a loading event. For this test, we built an artificial slab on top of it by adding about 10cm of snow to simulate a loading event. We then waited for about 1 hour to give this artificial slab a chance to bond to itself and the snow surfaces it was resting on. After an hour, we performed a PST on the interface between our "slab" and the snow surface. The test did not produce unstable results (see snowpit for details).

While we waited for our slab to bond, we went over to the S-SE aspects and found an uneven sun sculpted surface that had already started to soften by 11 am. We descended these S and SE aspects and found shallow corn conditions with loose wet snow resting on top of a firm melt-freeze layer and no signs of impending wet snow instability.