Poulsen's Peak observations

Our AIARE1 class toured up the west side of Poulsen’s Peak today, where we found about 3-4” of new snow. As we neared the summit ridge, we found small wind drifts but did not observe any cracking when stepping above the skin track or onto test slopes. We did find areas with wind-affected surface texture from the north winds overnight (photo).

After skiing a low-angle run through the trees, we dug a quick pit on a NE aspect at about 7400’, in an open area in near-treeline terrain, where snow depth was about 75cm. We found the 12/11 facets to be about 2mm in size and fist-hard, down about 50cm. A compression test failed on this layer with a CTH SC result. A shovel tilt test revealed the 12/28 interface but we were unable to see any buried surface hoar at our pit location. 

Weather over the course of the day followed a clearing trend from mostly cloudy skies in the morning to clear in the afternoon, with light N winds and cool temps near the summit. As we descended back into the valley in the afternoon, snow on lower sunny slopes was feeling moist and slightly heavy.