Crown profile from Frog Lake

Warm afternoon at Carson Pass, with surface forms varying between a thin wind layer, a thin melt layer, and a few inches of near surface facets.

While looking for the avalanche reported today, but triggered on Sunday, I dug a few quick pits and found shallow facets and shallow wind slabs, but no thick slabs over weak snow until I got to the avalanche site. There, a very dense slab was observed over weak facets. The following is from the avalanche site:

Pic 1: The slab had significant debris in it from the wind (branches and pine needles), which should make it pretty easy to track in this area. Looking back at the initial report, similar debris was also in the reporting party's photos.

Pic 2: Facets just smaller than 1mm under the slab (after ECT). They are beginning to round.

Profile: Done adjacent to Sunday's avalanche, in lower angle terrain and less wind loaded than the trigger point. The slab is quite dense, and it took more than the standard 30 loading steps to get an ECT to propagate. But when it did, it was planar and clean.