Ice Road Truckers

Have you ever watched Ice Road Truckers?  If you drive up the North Fork road you can experience it first hand..  Our destination was the northern Whitefish Range where we continued our search for buried surface hoar and monitored current surface conditions prior to an up-coming warm-up (yes another one).  

• Several pits on NE and NW aspects contained no buried surface hoar.
• We did find near surface facets at the 2/23 interface, but this layer did not propagate in our test pits.
• At mid and upper elevations along a wind-exposed ridge we encountered small, 4-6 inch thick windslabs, both soft and hard (4F).   These required extra persuasion to produce cracking.  
• We spotted many large cornice. We stompped on some smaller ones and found only their caps to be sensitive.  Don't play with the big ones when it gets warm.
• Southern aspects had up to 1" of new snow (graupel) above the 3/1 crust.  The crust is up to 2 inches thick and 1F hard.  
• Northern aspects, on the other hand, hold 6-8 inches of low-density snow on top of a 4F slab above the 2/5 crust.  
• Aside from stubborn and isolated cracking we witnessed no signs of instability

We felt comfortable skiing slopes over 35 degrees with only a short distance between skiers.