Blowing snow and Cracking in Wind-loaded Areas on Silver Peak

During our tour of Silver Peak today, the weather mainly started clear and sunny and became more cloudy and showery as the day went on. By the afternoon, convective snow showers passed through the area producing short but intense periods so f graupel. The winds also remained strong enough to blow snow along the near treeline ridges on Silver Peak. 

This blowing snow kept loading the wind slabs that formed during the recent storm. Blowing snow refilled our tracks on the ridge after about an hour. We could also see cornices building out over the wind-loaded slopes. When we kicked small wind-loaded test slopes, cracks shot out from our skis onto the slopes. We also triggered shooting cracks on lower angle wind-loaded slopes that traveled 20+ ft out onto more significant slopes. We did not get closer to these larger slopes since we had already seen plenty of signs that the wind slabs on them likely remained unstable. Despite these signs of unstable wind slabs, we only saw one recent wind slab avalanche along the Sierra Crest. We do not know whether the lack of observed avalanches was because they had filled back in during the storm, due to the snow showers obscuring visibility, or because few avalanches occurred in this area.  

In more sheltered terrain, we dug into the snow and found the old graupel layers. Snowpit tests did not yield unstable results on these layers. However, we did experience some small collapses and whumphs in lower elevation terrain where the new snow rested on top of a thin sun crust with soft snow below it.