Southern Madison

GNFAC,

I was up on the far south side of Bacon Rind today, skiing was great. Overcast clouds, temps warmed up throughout the day, light snowfall in the morning and a windy drive home at the end of the day. I dug a snowpit on an east facing slop around 8600'. Nothing ya'll don't know already- we found two surface hoar layers in the top part of the snowpack with an NSF layer in between, it doesn't seem to have enough of a slab on top to do anything yet. I attached a  copy of the snowpit.

Hopefully it snows soon!

Spencer

This morning while ascending a line on Sawtooth Mountain (Lower Novocain) we triggered an avalanche (ASu-SS-R2-D2-O)  that caught and carried my partner an estimated 180M and partially buried him. His leg and hand were unburied and excavation of the head was done in less than 2 minutes of the incident. The avalanche only involved new snow from the last 48hrs and was triggered on a MF crust/facet combo 30cm down(formed 1/30/22). The avalanche was 30cm at its deepest and 20-30M wide and ran 250M. We were lucky to find both skis and poles a little ways downslope.

We skied south of Quake Lake today, and found stable conditions. I observed one collapsed cornice from several days ago that had tumbled down a ~35 degree, east-facing slope at 9400' without triggering anything below it. A pit at ~8400' was 115 cm deep and showed a pretty thoroughly rotten, weak snowpack. We found no reactivity in an ECT, but I could get a shear about 15 cm down on a 1-2 cm layer of lower-density facets. We felt comfortable traveling and skiing in avalanche terrain, but the snow is so faceted near the surface that it can be difficult to sidehill on anything steep--the top of the snowpack feels more like sand than snow, and skis like it, too. I encountered similar conditions skiing above Hebgen Lake yesterday, and anticipate this snowpack to be reactive if it ever snows again.