schweitzer area snowpack 17/18

Hello all, i thought i would bring back the schweitzer snowpack discussion again this season. I will post most of the pit profiles i do on IPAC so if you want to see those you can head over there and look at the observations page.
I dug a pit on a SE facing slope at 5400 feet on schweitzer yesterday (1/2/18) to take a look and see what the buried surface hoar from dec 15 was doing, this layer has been our biggest problem this season and was extremely reactive to ski cutting and explosives when it was first buried. the snowpack was 126cm deep where we dug and the surface hoar was about 70cm down from the top, you could still see it clearly in the pit wall and it is well preserved. it took quite a few taps to get it to break with a compression test (CTH21) and it did not propagate with an ECT. When we tested this layer with a PST however it was very reactive and fully propagated (PST 38/100 end). The other layer of concern is the new snow old snow interface from the storm on saturday. This layer reacted easily with a compression test (CTE3) and initiated but did not propagate with a ECT. During the storm this new snow was a very reactive hard slab in some places and a not so reactive soft slab in others.
So the major takeaway i got from this pit is that there is a lot of spacial variability going on and if you can get the buried surface hoar to go it will go big. Avalanche canada reported a very large avalanche in the kootenai boundary on a 30 degree east facing slope this last week that went on the buried surface hoar, so this layer is waking up to the north of us. the angle, aspect and elevation of that slope is about the same as big blue outside the schweitzer boundary. We also observed a layer of facets underneath the buried surface hoar about 17cm thick. There was a fresh batch of surface hoar on top of it all so we could be in for a very interesting and scary snowpack if that gets buried in the next storm.
Have fun and be safe out there!
 
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