Shirley Canyon snow pack obs

We skied into Shirley Canyon today to assess how our new snow load was interacting with our existing, weak snowpack. The morning started brisk, with temps hovering in the teens at around 6200' elevation. Clear skies and light winds made for a beautiful skin out. We were surprised to find little evidence of any natural avalanche activity. We did observe small point release slides and smaller pockets that may have released midstorm yesterday (picture 1). Skinning through the low elevation trees we were reminded of our low coverage and was a good reminder to ski with caution on the descent. 

At 6700' we dug a snow pit on a NE aspect with a 28 degree slope angle. We found that on these northern aspects we could easily locate the faceted snowpack that we have all been hearing so much about. We found a 98cm deep snowpack, 49cm of that being new snow - a light graupel layer sat on top of the snowpack. A delicate melt freeze crust with fist hard facets and unconsolidated snow underneath. performing stability tests we got a CT 13 Q1 that fractured at the interface of the crust layer and faceted layer. Our larger column tests gave us ECTP 12 SP and ECTP 7 SP, both fracturing at the same interface as the CT. 

We continued up from our pit location to 7600 feet on north facing aspects, along the way we observed over a dozen whumpfs with 5 of them being quite substantial. The largest of the whumpfs we observed was a noticeable collapse that was accompanied by a crack that propagated approximately 30 feet (Picture 4). On close examination we found that the crack traveled along the crust/facet interface underneath the storm snow. Additionally we noticed ample wind loading on northeast slopes with plenty of wind affected snow texture along ridge lines (Picture 5). 

We transitioned at 7600 feet and skied down low angle north facing terrain, while ski quality was quite good the low coverage hazards are still present and caution should be used to maintain a long ski season! While skiing down we continued to hear audible whumpfing in the snowpack and small sloughing was easily initiated. 

NOTE: Our snow pit test results are representative of the poor structure of our current snowpack. We believe the lack of avalanche activity and moving snow on our tour is a result of the new snow remaining unconsolidated for now, and we expect that to change as settlement occurs.