Professional Observations - Patrol Ridge, Skyland Area
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Location Name: Professional Observations - Patrol Ridge, Skyland Area Region: Flathead Range - Marias Pass/Skyland Date and time of observation: Wed, 01/13/2016 - 14:00 |
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Location Map: |
Red Flags: Recent avalanche activity |
Observation made by: Professional Observer
Any other comments about the observation or links to outside pages that have more info on the observation:
We noticed roller balls below 6500 feet that were the result of tree bombs melting and falling from trees. Also we noticed the reamains of a recent avalanche on Slippery Bill mountain that looked like it might haves started as a cornice failure. It was small relative to the path and traveled approximately 1000 vertical feet.
Patrol Ridge: A quick pit at 6900' on a North aspect revealed a largely "right side up" snowpack with generally increasing density from the surface to the dec 9 crust. The total snow depth was 150 cm at our pit location.There were three distinct layers surround the December crust that alternated between approximately 2 cm of knife hard crusts separated by approximately 2 cm of 1 finger hardness. Below the crust was sugary unconsolidated snow to ground.
We conducted 2 ECTs and got ECTN6 and ECTN4 at 13 cm from the surface. This may have been a on a small layer of facets (buried surface hoar?) not identified as a specific layer. WThe first ECT had a second ECTN28 approximately 40 cm from the surface that we could not replicated in the second test.
In general the snow was good from 6900-6500 feet. It progressively got heavier as we decended below 6500 feet..but still fun to ski.
Activity:
Skiing
Precip Rate:
S -1; very light snowfall, trace to 0.5cm/hour
High Temp. (C):
-1
Low Temp. (C):
-1
