Silver Peak Observations

We toured Silver Peak today. At 9 am the morning started out sunny as last night's storm cleared out. At 11 am, thick cloud cover moved in and light snow showers began around 11:30 am. Off and on light snow showers continued at max S1 and usually lesser intensity for the remainder of our tour which ended at 2 pm.

On our approach, we note 9 inches of new snow in wind protected areas on Silver Peak. We saw some very minor cracking within the new snow while breaking trail, indicative of potential storm slab instability. We observed that these cracks were within the new snow and did not go all the way down to the old/new snow interface. The weak layer was plate crystals within the lower portion of the new snow. We ski cut a few wind protected test slopes below treeline and saw no further signs of storm slab instability.

As we approached the east ridge and near treeline terrain, we could see light to moderate amounts of drifting snow as SW winds continued. Along the ridgetop, we tested a few wind pillows above wind loaded slopes and saw minor wind slab formation up to 2 feet thick but propagation was minimal. Two hours later when we retested one of these same spots, we were able to trigger a small wind slab failure that had drifted in and formed on top of the new snow.

We dug a test pit to look at the Feb 19 rain crust and potential faceted snow around it but saw no indications of instability with either the ECT or PST which scored ECTX and PST 100/100 end, targeting weaker snow directly below the rain crust. In this location, there were about 16 inches of snow load on top of the Feb 19 crust.

On our exit from the area, we noted that some minor snow surface warming had occurred in open areas below about 6,500'. Otherwise, we saw no signs of warming instability while up on the peak during the sunny morning hours prior to the development of cloud cover.