The Baskin Robbins of Crusts

The Europeans have a lot of words for snow. Firnspiegle: a thin, reflective sheet of ice on the surface of sunny slopes. Sastrugi: hard, sculpted wind board. Those are just two of the 31 flavors of crust we got to sample today on our way to check out a glide crack in southern Glacier Park.

• The 1/13 rain crust goes up to our high point of 6,996'. Windward slopes, west to south, were stripped down to the 1/13 crust or to the ground above about 5,000'. In some places the wind has rimed the crust, in others the sun has polished it into a mirror of ice. In some places it's bulletproof and in others it's breakable. On some sunny slopes where the wind had not stripped down to the 1/13 crust, the surface is almost going through a corn cycle with a thick melt-freeze crust at the surface. Small, hard, stubborn wind slabs  littered the surface just below ridges and downwind of trees and rollovers. These were up to 8" thick and for all our stomping on them we could only get a few thin cornices and slabs to crack around the edges.
• We saw a few small, natural wind slab avalanche that likely failed during the quick storm on the 17th. These ran on the 1/13 crust. We also saw a some roller balls on sunny slopes that likely tumbled down as the snow from the 17th saw sun for the first time then next day.
• The upper snowpack structure is not great. There are near surface facets developing under and above the 1/13 rain crust. In many areas, there is a thin wind skin on the surface covering sugary snow on top of the rain crust. I hope it improves before getting significant new loading.
• The glide crack is about 200' wide and over 4' deep. It has slumped quite a bit since the last atmospheric river event but has not slid yet. The ground beneath is warm and wet beargrass and mud, not frozen, and the snow at the bottom is moist. The snow on the slope below is wrinkled like the forehead of a bloodhound. It will be interesting to see if and when this thing slides.

We spent a lot of time traversing and stem turning in the breakable crust. The best snow we found was on a low-angled ridgeline that skied almost like corn.