Moody Day In The Middle Fork

We went to the Flathead Range today to see if northerly slopes were warming from the greenhouse effect, and to further document any glide cracks.

• We found that northerly aspects have already been through the melt-freeze cycle up into the middle elevation band. We saw many old loose wet and even wet slab avalanches that ran on north-facing terrain below about 5800' during the last major warm up.
• We ski cut very steep rollovers on middle and lower elevation northerly slopes after noon with no results.
• We saw more impressive carnage from the last major avalanche cycle (week of 3/18-25) including D1-D2.5 loose wet, wet slab, and glide avalanches. We saw four different open glide cracks on south-facing middle elevation slopes that have not yet slid.
• We saw no signs of instability today - some small rollerballs that were probably a few days old.
• We found that the snowpack was melt-freeze up to about 5200'. Above that the surface was still melt-freeze, but the snow was dry and faceted under 3" of melt-freeze crust. There was 1" of new snow above 4500' that was transitioning to moist and was super gloppy. We didn't make it above 5600' today.
• We skied very steep mid-elevation, northerly slopes around 1pm. We avoided slopes under the glide cracks. The skiing was mostly good corn.