Wet new snow on Castle Peak

We hiked up to the NW face of Caste Peak today to look at the effects of recent rain (0.5 to 0.7 inches) and wet new snow (1 to 3 inches) on top of the faceted upper snowpack across the 7,200' to 8,800' elevation range. At 7,500' where we had previously seen loose dry facets below the surface crust, rain has now increased the moisture of the facets making them wet and easily form into a dense snowball. At that elevation there was a trace of new snow that fell on the tail end of rain event. Moving up in elevation we encountered an inch of new snow around 8,200' that abruptly increased to 2-3 inches of new snow at 8,500'. This new snow was wet and formed rollerballs if surface snow was knocked downhill.

Moving up in elevation through the 8,300' to 8,800' elevation range the Nov 9 facet layer in the upper snowpack became drier and still loose grained, similar to pre storm at around 8,500'. Snowpit tests at 8,680' adjacent to the snowpit from Nov 29 revealed some interesting ECTP results on the Nov 9 facet layer to did not coincide with likely propagation indications from the PST.