Light snowfall, unconsolidated snow, and crusts in Deep Creek

We toured N aspects in Deep Creek today. The morning started with mostly clear skies. This gave way to full cloud cover by late morning. By midday near continuous snow showers with only trace accumulation was occurrring.Upon our exit from the area around 2 pm, higher intensity snowfall was occurring with less than 1 cm of accumulation.

We saw the expected lingering unconsolidated snow in wind protected areas below treeline and wind affected snow surfaces in near treeline terrain. In wind affected areas, the snow surface held a thin surface slab of wind compacted snow, sometimes supportable, sometimes breakable. Sun crust existed on low angle N aspects up to our highpoint of travel at 8,000'.

In near treeline terrain we encountered some limited areas of drifting snow. On a N aspect, corniced test slope, the surface wind slab was only an inch thick. Ski cuts in this slope produced no results.