Layer cake

Riding quality was:

OK

Snow conditions were:

• Crusty
• Hard
• Powder

We rode:

• Cut blocks
• Dense trees
• Mellow slopes
• Open trees

We stayed away from:

• Alpine slopes
• Convex slopes
• Steep slopes

The day was:

• Cloudy
• Cold
• Stormy
• Windy

In the Wapiti for an AST1 course today and found a smidge of new snow! Once we got above 1600 m we found the scattered flurries had deposited between 5 and 20 cm of fresh snow on top of last weeks melt freeze crust. Snow is very light and we didn’t see any signs of wind or storm slab instability. Visibility was poor above 1600 m as well, so we couldn’t see into the alpine all day.

Our pit had two layers reacting and propagating in the hard range, a snow layer that looked like decomposing stellars down 50 cm and the November crust down 110 cm. Both failed almost together on the 24th or 25th tap in column tests, and both propagated across the full extended column as well, on the 26th or 27th tap.

Height of snow was 130 cm at the pit at 1650 m.