New Year's Eve

For our final trick of 2020, we went to the south end of Glacier Park to see if we could find and manage today's strom slab problem.

• While we got some minor cracking from the new snow in wind sheltered areas, leeward slopes were the slabs were most sensitive. On convex, east-facing, mid-elevation test slopes we got shooting cracks and were able to trigger a few small soft slabs. These slabs we two-layered with both the new snow and old snow from last weekend breaking together on the faceting crust buried on December 22nd.
• The 12/22 crust thins above about 6,000 feet, but was still present at our high point near 6,500 feet. There are facets above and below the 12/22 crust. We dug two test pits on east aspects at 6,000 and 6,500 feet and we didn't get any propagating test results. There is a thin layer of softer snow that was burried on the 14th (which is a crust elsewhere, but not here). Finally we found the thick, hard crust from 12/9 down about 90cm and we got no test results on that layer.
• We had light to moderate snow showers all day, and light west winds gusting to moderate occasionally drifting the new snow. It was warmer than expected with temperatures above freezing and occasional light rain on the canyon floor. We saw lots of roller balls and little point releases from road cuts on our drive home up the Middle Fork.

After we identified wind loaded features as the primary hazard, we steered away from bigger, consequential terrain below cornices on leeward aspects and we enjoyed nice powder skiing.