Cold Snow on Incline Lake Peak

Snow reports and webcams showed more new snow in the Mt. Rose area, so we went to Incline Lake Peak to see how this additional snow affected the existing snowpack. From the start, the new snow felt cold and unconsolidated. It did not clump together when I squeezed it in my hands, even on the sunny slopes where we could feel the previous day's sun crusts below the new snow. We went to some steep but sheltered test slopes where we saw evidence of previous small (4-6 inch deep) avalanches that likely happened on Friday when Thursday's storm snow slid on the firm old snow below it. We ski cut this slope, and last night's snow also sluffed off that same firm old snow. This sluffing indicated a lack of cohesion in the new snow and poor bonding between the new and old snow. 

We found several wind-loaded test slopes closer to the ridge in near treeline terrain. Many of these had cornices on them and signs of previous cornice failure. The new snow did not look or feel very wind affected. We could feel old wind slabs below the fresh snow. We kicked these slopes and dropped small cornice pieces on them without triggering additional signs of wind slab instability. A snowpit in one of these test slopes revealed old graupel layers and the buried surface hoar layer, but tests targeting both these layers did not produce unstable results (ECTNs on both layers, PST 85/100 END on the surface hoar, and PST 75/100 END on the graupel).

On the way out at 1:30 pm, we started encountering warmer snow on E-SE aspects but did not see any wet snow instabilities. Cloud cover also started increasing over Incline Lake Peak at this time.