Observation: Turnagain

Location: Seattle Ridge

Date:
Observer:
Route & General Observations

We rode around Seattle Ridge today, getting a look at the extent of wet avalanche activity so far, and checking out surface conditions on all aspects. We rode north to Pyramid, stopping by the weather station and passing through Main (1st) Bowl, Jr’s (2nd), 3rd, and 4th bowls along the way. We noted widespread wet avalanche activity from the past few weeks, including a lot of wet loose and glide avalanches and a handful of smaller wet slabs. We have yet to see a big wet slab cycle this season.

Weather & Snow Characteristics
Please provide details to help us determine the weather and snowpack during the time this observation took place.
Weather

Skies started off mostly sunny but were mostly cloudy by the afternoon. Temperatures were in the 40's to 50 F in the parking lot, and in the upper 30's F up high. Winds were calm.

Snow surface

We have gotten around 4" or so of new snow this week, which was settled into about 2" of moist snow on northerly aspects and has already gone through a melt/freeze cycle on all others. Below 1500' the surface crusts were just barely supportable by around 11:30 this morning, and were starting to get pretty loose by around 4 p.m.

Snowpack

All slopes had a supportable crust above around 2000'. Southerly aspects were heating up later in the day, and the snow under the crust was very wet and sloppy. Northerly aspects have had little to no avalanche activity at least since the latest snowfall that we could see.

We did not dig any pits today.

Photos & Video
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