Professional Observation

Observation Details

Signs of Unstable Snow

Key Points

AIARE L2 planned a half day field tour this afternoon, with the goals of tracking sun crust across aspect, elevation and incline. We skied up E and SE aspects, finding E aspects with 25 deg slope angle to have pronounced sun crust, though on lower angles it was not as uniform. All SE and S aspects we traveled over had a 1-2cm thick MFcr.

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1300 S/SE EQ Dome 9198′

Tair -2.5/Tsurf -4/T20 -5

Wind East Mod Gusting Strong

Sky- BKN

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One of the more interesting and surprising observations we made were a number of deep cracks forming at the entrances to several of the common ski runs of EQ Dome’s NE and N aspects. Some of these look more like creep cracks, with the weight of the snowpack causing large moat features to open up, with others being more like melt holes. Geothermal warming may have played a roll in these cracks. These are large enough to fall into, and are a hazard similar to a deep tree well, though we found them on the downhill side of convexities so skiing into them unaware of their existence is a possibility, as one member of our group discovered yesterday.