Touchy storm snow, Andesite Peak

Toured up towards Andesite to assess how our new snow is melding with the existing snowpack. At the Castle Peak trailhead we observed about 20cm of fresh new snow, heavy winds and blowing snow. Following the summer trail up it was easy to use small indicator slopes and terrain features to get an easy handle on the reactivity of our new snow. In sheltered areas we primarily observed our storm slab problem and found it to be touchy, plenty of shooting cracks and collapsing. As we moved higher, hasty pits further highlighted this storm slab's touchiness given a trigger. At 7,525' elevation we dug into the snow and found 50cm of new snow with a thin 1/2 cm of graupel underneath, this new slab sat utop our existing faceted snowpack. While column tests did not indicate an instability that would allow for a slide to step down into the existing weak layers, it did highlight the poor bond of new to old snow. Additionally we found boot penetration to be hip deep and ski penetration to be around 30cm deeps. Gaining the ridge towards the top we observed some heavily windloaded start zones in the steeper terrain, probing about showed these to be over 120cm deep of new snow, no significant cornice development was seen. Skiing back down through moderate terrain and avoiding the steeper pockets we found excellent ski quality. Heavy snow through the duration of our tour with only minimal clearing towards the tail end of the day.