Warming up in Skiumah

Late afternoon tour above Skiumah Lake to assess how today's warming temperatures affected the snowpack

• At low elevations, 6" of moist snow was welded to the underlying crust. No avalanche concerns apart from some harmless rollerballs.
• At mid and upper elevations, there was 16" to 20" of storm snow over the last rain crust.  The snow has noticeably settled since yesterday; up to 4F hardness near the crust and ski pen is half as deep (~10").  We did not observe any storm slab signs of instability on various slopes up to 40*
• Southerly aspects caught just enough sun today to moisten the top few inches and trigger a couple of very small loose snow avalanches.
• Moderate southwest winds today formed shallow wind slabs.  We triggered a couple of 6" slabs on cross-loaded pockets at mid elevations.  
• We saw 3 small storm slabs that were skier triggered yesterday on convex terrain features. They were about a foot deep and appeared to fail on mid-storm layers.  There were also several recent D2 debris piles near Skiumah Lake from long-running avalanches in the new snow.