Crust Bustin'

traveled up to the point just south of Strawberry Lake to assess for warming instabilities, potential storm slabs, and to check on the persistent facet layer.

• Small to medium rollerballs were common today below about 6000' on south, southwest, and west aspects. We didn't manage to trigger any loose wet point releases on steeper slopes. We had no direct feed back from storm slabs other than some shallow, localized cracking around our skis in wind drifted snow near ridgelines above 6000'. We saw no recent avalanches and had no shooting cracks or whumpfing.
• There was a thin freezing rain crust up to about 5500' that was limiting surface instabilities. Snow on northwest and northerly aspects, and above 6000' on southerly aspects was cold wintry snow. Finding no obvious signs of instability we went digging for more information. We found 2 graupel/crust combinations about 8" and 1.5' deep that showed some potential for failure in small column tests, but we got no propagating results in any layer - including the December facets. The facets are generally buried almost 3' deep under a strong mid-pack and in some places (in our test pit at 5600') they were rounding and seemed to be gaining strength.
• Thankfully no rain in our neck of the Swan today, but we had occasional light snowfall (S-1, graupel) and occasional light south winds with no blowing snow. Temperatures were warm, and greatly affected the surface snow below about 6000' on southerly aspects and below about 5500' on northerly slopes.
• We skied slopes steeper than 35 degrees steering clear of slopes directly below cliffs and cornices to reduce our exposure to overhead hazards. We avoided steep slopes directly above terrain traps to reduce our consequences in the event that we managed to trigger something small. Because we also avoided steep, wind-drifted slopes at upper elevations, and areas with thin, variable snow cover, our biggest hazard for the day felt like the less than ideal skiing conditions.