January 21, 2006, Bennett

Did a few laps on one of the clearcuts and a short run past the clearcuts above the traverse. Snow was like soft deep styrofoam - if you can picture that! We turned around at the the part where the traverse goes over a tight steep slope with exposure (can't remember name) - it just looked way too menacing with huge wind drifts covering any remnants of a previous ski path - so we turned around and went back to the clearcuts and built a jump. No evidence of avys, although Meadows spent the morning blasting. A pit showed minimal layering in the new snow and depth to previous layer was ~ 2 ft. A shovel shear test failed very easily and almost right down to the old layer - shear surface was messy. Compression test did not fail easily - in fact, it never really did and I had to apply Arnold force to more or less crush the block to failure. Temperature was around 30 and snow was well "glued" (maybe why shear test went easily with new layer & compression didn't). Overall, a fun day. :)