Small wind slabs and dryish loose wet avalanches on Incline Lake Peak.

Touring the Incline Lake Peak area this morning we found 8" of storm snow at 9,200' at 10:30 am. Off and on snow showers with fog conditions. Max snowfall rate of S2 during showers.

On the ascent, we stopped and dug a testpit on a N aspect at 9,240' in open below treeline terrain. The top 70 cm of the snowpack was right side up and revealed only ECTN results. HS at that location was >3.7m.

Upon reaching the summit ridge, winds were lighter than expected and only felt while on the ridgetop proper. Corniced areas held wind slabs below. Cornices broke easily with a simple ski kick. I dropped cornice sections onto about a half dozen test slopes and only got one of them to fail with a propagating wind slab. This wind slab was 6 inches thick. On the rest of the slopes the cornice chunks entrained some snow but did not produce a slab failure.

While descending, we were able to intentionally trigger loose wet avalanches by ski cutting on steep convex terrain features in wind protected areas below treeline. These loose wet avalanches were at the drier end of the loose wet avalanche spectrum. These size D1 avalanches involved only the top 4" of the storm snow.