January 6
Mill F, Willow, West Monitor, Wills Hill, Willow Heights
Elevations, slope angles and aspects
7800-10200', angles over 35°, all aspects.
Snow conditions
Mild temperatures were doing a good job of eliminating lower elevation snow.
Able to navigate through the patches up Willow with corn like conditions on what's left.
Shady aspects were also affected with some surface crusting at mid and lower elevations.
Upper elevation suffered from the big blow with only the most sheltered, unaffected by the wind.
West facing suffered the worst. Wills as an exit was quite challenging.
Experienced several isolated collapses in patches of very shallow snow.
Weather
Partly cloudy skies, mild temperatures and light wind.
Avalanche activity
Was curious about the reported "175' wide, 2' deep" avalanche in West Monitor so I...
Seeing three slides. Looker's left sluff, shallow new snow middle and the monster? on the right.
The largest slide is about one third the size reported, occurring in a notorious, for slides, path.
Concave at the top, it catches wind blown snow, the path rolls over immediately with no support provided by the convex rock band below.
Evaluation
Mostly stable, crusted snow conditions in the area.
Head planting or otherwise taking a digger in a wind drifted area is not advisable.
Weather guessers missed the current snowfall so...
Instability would be dependent on bonding of new snow to the old surface.
Recent snow pits indicate weakness at the "rain crust"-facet interface. That layering may activate with enough load.
There could be active wind drifted patches lingering, with some potential for release into old snow.
Wet activity with the quick warm up currently suggested.
Kinda doubt the sky is falling.
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