Where'd the Sun Go Road

Went for an inversion excursion to the interior of Glacier Park to get some baseline data about our snowpack at upper elevations near the continental divide.

• The stratus deck continues to plague our region during this period of prolonged high pressure. We were able to break free around 4400'.
• Once above the inversion, we found widespread surface hoar and near surface facets.
• Our up route had us traveling on mostly S/SW faces below 5500'. Between 4500'-5500', the surface hoar is small/meduim (5mm-15mm) and in many places forming on top of a faceting melt-freeze crust (this structure will be dangerous if preserved/burried under a new slab.
• Above 5500', the surface hoar is larger (15-30mm) and forming on top of an impressively deep layer of near surface facets (8-12 inches of weak faceted snow). This is making for surprisingly good skiing in the short term, but again, will likely burden our region with a persistent weak layer in the weeks/months ahead.

• As we made our way up towards Granite Park we started traveling on more open sunny slopes above treeline. We continued to find dry faceted snow with surface hoar on top. We were expecting for the alpine snow to harbor a stiff melt freeze crust or wind board on south facing, but it seems that the repeated clear cold nights have been slowly weakening and decomposing the stiff formations that were present earlier in the week on many sunny aspects near treeline. We passed by the Chalet around 11:30am and we were just starting to observe the effects of intense solar as the surface snow began to warm up and stick to our skins a bit.
• Once above 6800', we began to find wind effected snow near Swiftcurrent Pass. Despite shallow/spotty coverage on the southerlies of Swiftcurrent Mountain, we pressed onward to the lookout to enjoy the tranquil day and big views. 5-10mph SW winds on the summit.
• Once on top, we observed that the cloud deck was migrating downvalley towards the Avlanche creek/McDonald Creek Confluece, allowing afternoon sunshine the reach lower elevations.
• We also noticed a large avalanche on the E/SE slopes of Iceberg peak. Type and Date: Unknown, but we beleive it was a wet snow avalanche the ran Dec 2nd-5th.
• Wind and Sun have removed much of the snow on Swiftcurrent's south face, and many of the peaks on eastern front are also showing very thin coverage. We took a measurement on one part of our climb that actually had a large continuous snow patch and found 51cm at 7782'

• By 2:00pm, we descended, carefully linking up frekles of snow and found enjoyable skiing on sun-softened windboard. We observed good stability on decdent, however, we did not ski anything steeper than 30 degrees above treeline. Based on how warm/soft some of our skiing was, I imagine that steeper W and S facing would have been reactive late afternoon.
• Back down below the Chalet, the snow was still mostly dry/cold. Surface hoar survived the day and was still widespead on all aspects below 6800'
• During our decent back to the GTTS road, we observed numerous small natural wet loose-avalanches from the day. All were size 1 and on S and SW facing.