Bountiful Beadnell

We made our way up towards Mount Beadnell today, and were delighted to find that our recent convective weather has been very generous! There was 25 cm of new snow at 700m where we got on our sleds, and this got bumped up to 60cm by 1000m. The April 8 crust is about 2cm thick, and is supportive to sleds as long as you don't make too drastic of moves. However, once you punch through the crust, it is easy to get bogged down in the moist snow below. We headed up to 1400m to get a view of the treeline and alpine. We were surprised to see minimal natural avalanche activity, but there was evidence of moderate wind effect at TL and above. The sun, for the moments it poked out, was intensely warm. In our snow pit we were happy to find right side up storm snow. While we did get some moderate results within the storm snow, there were no clean shears that would suggest slab potential, and the new snow appears well bonded to the previous crusts. We expect this would be different in areas of wind loading or when the snow sees some consistent solar warming. With the tough travel on sleds today, we kept out of the TL and Alpine. The sledding was all time! One of the best days we have had all season.