2221 feet before work

One of the best things about living in RenoSlashTahoe is that you can bag a few runs of Sweet Backcountry snow before work. Huck Tater and I hit Credit Card and got two runs of really killer un-tracked snow.

Note: the track encroaching from the north is one Barrett and I put down a few weeks ago.

EDIT:

I forgot to mention that we experiences some sketchy avalanche conditions in a couple of places. There is about 6 to 12 inches of new wet snow on top of a crust, which seems to be on top of a loose layer, though there doesn’t appear to be much more than 3 feet total in that particular area. There was some slab sliding of that top layer as we hiked back up. The slab we saw was only about the size of a card table and didn’t slide more than 6 inches. It was about 9 inches thick.

Then right at the top there was a lot of whumping and cracking as we traversed. This was within 5 meters of the road. I broke trail very fast, Huck had a reprieve from the insisting advances of “Uncle Frank” and Juni didn’t seem to notice.

Cracks didn’t propagate more than a ski length and there was only settling, no sliding. Still, it was sketchy since we were above a wide open area with trees below…

This observation seems consistent with the Sierra Avalanche Center’s Concern #2 for February 24th, 2010 at 07:01 AM :

Avalanche Concern #2:

“As the snow fell last night, temperatures increased causing a layer of heavy, wet snow to accumulate on top of a layer of lighter, colder snow. This heavy layer on top of a lighter layer created an upside-down snowpack. Today, adding a person on top of the heavy, wet snow on the surface could overload the lighter snow layer below resulting in avalanche activity. These types avalanches will be possible on slopes steeper than 35 degrees where this upside-down snowpack exists.”

-M

Tags: gps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 12:50 pm and is filed under backcountry, Skiing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.