It was a spooky day out on Richmond Ridge. The first few steps I took onto an untouched northwest slope, and cracks spiderwebbed hundreds of feet across the slope, sliding about an inch before the slab arrested. I then wrapped onto west-facing slopes, and there were no signs of instability, with mostly stable snowpack test results. As I went back to east and northeast-facing slopes, and I got rumbling collapses on low-angle slopes that shook trees a hundred feet away, with no cracks. All snowpack test failures and all the shooting cracks and collapses occurred on the old snow surface, the upper persistent weak layer of concern, about 50 to 70 cm below the snow surface underneath a cohesive slab of new snow from the past couple of days.

Richmond Ridge

Gondola about 2 miles out Richmond Ridge traveling on the east and west side down to around 10500 ft. then back to the resort.

Observed many large and very large avalanches up Conundrum Creek and around Richmond Ridge. Avalanches will be coded in separate observations.

The new slab was about 2 to 3 feet thick, varying between F and 4F- hard (on the hand hardness scale) at the top and 1F- hard by the bottom. On a northeast-facing slope just below 11,000 feet, there was 3.7 inches of snow water equivalent (SWE) in the new storm snow making up the slab, notably more than the 2.5 inches of SWE that the Castle Peak SNOTEL station recorded since the start of this past storm on (Feb 13-16). After getting shooting cracks on a northwest-facing slope I went back to the same slope about 2 hours later and got another slope scale collapse with more shooting cracks. Extended column tests most consistently showed propagating failures between 10 and 20 taps throughout the with a few non-propagating failures, mostly on west-facing slopes, and a few took over 20 taps with one ECTP4 as well, all on northwest, east, and northeast-facing slopes. Although snowpack tests aren't all that relevant when you are getting slopescale collapses on numerous meadows, the snowpack tests also point towards a scary snowpack with the January drought persistent weak layer as the main layer of concern with the potential for avalanches to step down to the December drought persistent weak layer.

Beautiful morning with increasing clouds throughout the day and snow started around 2 to 3PM.