January 8, 2011, Stevens Pass
1/8/11
WA Stevens Pass
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We found conditions much like those being described in the Snoqualmie thread that Silas started today just a bit east of Stevens Pass on mostly west-facing slopes. There was very little new snow over the forming rain crust below 4K in the morning. Even though conditions couldn't match the tours I did the week before and the week after Xmas, there was enough nice new snow in deeper deposits above 5K to justify an extra lap before we made our final run back to the car.
We dug hasty pits at about 5500 on open west facing glades and nothing moved until about 20" down, where a harder crusty layer (sorry, I was not super anal about it - maybe one finger hard...) lay atop a looser layer (easy to get four fingers in) that seemed sugary to me (sorry, no magnifier). We did two pits a ways apart to keep everyone in the party in the action and to get at least two sample points, and on one there was a CT14 on that layer, and on the other, no failures on the compression test, but we both got medium sheers with the shovel shear test at that layer. We decided that the two moderately thick crusts between that and the surface made that layer not so much of a worry for our runs. The new snow was a bit reactive, with some fracturing above the skin track and I was also able to ski loose a very small slab (maybe between one and two sheets of plywood in area) on a convex wind feature on our descent, which did not pick up much snow, and which stopped moving after about 20 feet on a 30+ degree slope. I had big enough sluffs following me on our second descent at about 3PM to get my attention, but never big enough to knock a skier over or anything like that.
We dug hasty pits at about 5500 on open west facing glades and nothing moved until about 20" down, where a harder crusty layer (sorry, I was not super anal about it - maybe one finger hard...) lay atop a looser layer (easy to get four fingers in) that seemed sugary to me (sorry, no magnifier). We did two pits a ways apart to keep everyone in the party in the action and to get at least two sample points, and on one there was a CT14 on that layer, and on the other, no failures on the compression test, but we both got medium sheers with the shovel shear test at that layer. We decided that the two moderately thick crusts between that and the surface made that layer not so much of a worry for our runs. The new snow was a bit reactive, with some fracturing above the skin track and I was also able to ski loose a very small slab (maybe between one and two sheets of plywood in area) on a convex wind feature on our descent, which did not pick up much snow, and which stopped moving after about 20 feet on a 30+ degree slope. I had big enough sluffs following me on our second descent at about 3PM to get my attention, but never big enough to knock a skier over or anything like that.
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