For Christmas this year we got an entire seasons snowpack in a single storm cycle. A Pineapple express stayed over Utah for several days with over 5.5" of water at Mammoth/Cottonwood, sundance got nearly 12" of water, and places in Southern Utah received 18"+ of water, so needless to say, with a couple of inverted layers coupled with such an enormous amount of snow, a substantial natural cycle occurred in the usual suuspect, NE facing steep, windloaded slopes.
Although overall things did not come completely unglued, the Phone Shot did run wall to wall.
That much new snow and weight also knocked down alot of timber, but with such a Bluebird day, the scenery could have not been prettier. Trail breaking on ski's and snowmobiles was pretty tough, Steve didn't have any trouble, but I got the snowmobile stuck twice just on the way in.
We were pretty comfortable with the old snow and wanted to see how all that new snow was behaving. When we had dug down 200 cm (the length of steves ruler, and usually sufficient for the Plateau, we stopped digging, so from now on, we will be measuring from the top down. The two main bursts of the storm cycle both featured rising temperatures inverting the snow pack, and those layers were fairly evident, and while they would compress on isolated columns, the ECT tests would not propogate and would take 20-30 taps to collapse. That means nothing but good news for deep snowpack stability this year. STRONG-STRONG-STRONG!
Skiing was a mixed bag, some barely supportable windslab with 4" of fluff on top that would give way to inverted layers that tails would punch through and once you were down into that layer you could plow on through with square turns, all and all, a pretty good workout. With a little finese, you could make it look good
No comments:
Post a Comment