20-21

From obs.: "Observed widespread surface hoar large in size. Everywhere in shaded terrain in the daisy pass area today. Some grew to about 5mm size. Made for awesome riding conditions currently. Definitely a future issue to be heads up for." Photo: J. Wenzel

Obs from a skier in NW corner of Yellowstone NP: "Snowpack was 10-18” and all sugar / large facets. Surprisingly, on low angle meadow, making some turns turned-out to be pretty good. While faceted, there was a little denseness (word?) to the base. I suspect steeper terrain would be easier to hit the ground. All surfaces were covered with SH - as you would imagine." Photo: A. Crawford

Found some facets (didn’t seem super developed) below an ice crust about 65cm down in the snowpack at the bottom of the mineral mountain northside burn. Got a fracture on this layer in our ECT but no propagation. Shovel shear showed a rough shear quality. Lots of surface hoar forming both in Sheep Creek and Hayden Creek.

Up to the summit of Barronette today. We once again observed a very thin and weak snowpack. This is in stark contrast to Cooke just a few miles down the road! Solar aspects have crusts and faceted snow, shady aspects are entirely faceted and weak enough that facet sluffing occurred on steeper slopes. HS between 10 and 75 cm.

Observed widespread surface hoar large in size. Everywhere in shaded terrain in the daisy pass area today. Some grew to about 5mm size. Made for awesome riding conditions currently. Definitely a future issue to be heads up for.

Shaded aspects had large surface hoar. Sun affected aspects had a pretty wide-spread sun crust. Roller balls were observed on solar aspects, but no other signs of instability yet.