warm, graybird
Observation: Douglas Island
Location: Ben Stewart
Skinned up wedding bowl and out constellation bowl. Edgeable crust on all terrain… I’m diggin’ those good vibrations was the theme song of the descent.
Weather
Snow surface
crusty, glacial ice density rime high up, cornesque skiing where crust had been upset by previous tracks.
Snowpack
Dug at 2600' in wedding bowl, right above where track skirts climbers left of the bowl. Depth exceeded 3m. Surface crust was a several mm thick pencil or knife hard layer with a 5 cm thick one finger hard layer below. 5-45 cm down consisted of windpacked 4 finger hardness snow. An impressive 20cm pencil hard crust (Feb 10?) sits below the new snow, with wet one finger hard wet snow below that extends down to 1m under the snow surface where I stopped digging. I did a junky ECT down to the Feb 10 crust. I needed to saw through the surface to get my cord into the snowpack. ECT25N 25cm down midway through the wind packed snow.
Rimy summit shredding