Corn Quest

Despite many weather stations reporting a brief and weak freeze Friday night, we were pleasantly suprised to discover nice supportable snow in the Southern Flathead range and great corn skiing before noon.

• Toured up Dickey Creek to access South facing terrain on Paola Ridge.
• We were ascending south facing slopes from 4600' to 7200' between 830am and 11:00am. Open slopes were supportable/firm during our climb, however we found semi punchy snow near vegetation and in the trees.
• Filtered sunshine and a light breeze this morning seemed to benefit us by slowing down the thaw process a bit. Perfect corn on South facing slopes was around 1030-1100am. We were skiing around noon which was still fine but the corn was starting to overripen. Had we been trying to ski steeper terrain today, noon would have been too late and dangerous. We were mostly skiing 25-35 degree slopes and did not have any significant wet snow instabilities arise.
• Observed numerous wet loose avalanches and glide cracks in upper Dickey Creek. All on south and southeast facing slopes. Some of the larger debris piles appeared to be somewhat recent (last two days)
• Near ridgetop, we noted that there was still dry snow to be found on the north side of Paola Ridge.