General Observations

Our group of 4 parked on the Richardson highway at the McCallum Creek road, skinned up the gravel road towards the cell tower and then headed N up the obvious peak E of the cell tower.  We observed quite a few slides on S & SW facing slopes (looked to be 3-5 days old) as well as a couple slides on N facing slopes.  No other red flags observed.

We dug 4 total pits throughout the day, 1 on a S facing slope at 4.6k’ and 3 on a N facing slope around 5.2k’. 

 – S facing pit: coherent snowpack (4 fingers to 1 finger hardness) with no obvious weak layers, ECTX. 

 – N facing pits (1 full pit w/ CT & ECT, 2 partial pits looking for weak layers):  1st pit showed 4″ of powder, then a 4-6″ 1-finger slab that sat on a hoar frost weak layer.  Below that, it was a 1-4 finger slab all the way to a 100 cm depth (ECTX, but failed all the way across the column on the hoar frost layer when prying with a shovel).  Overall snowpack varied from 60 cm to 280 cm.  Other 2 pits were informal holes dug to assess snow hardness…2nd pit did not show any weak layer, 3rd pit showed a 60 cm snowpack with a ~ 10cm layer of facets at ground level with a ~ 50 cm 1-2 finger slab sitting on top of that weak layer

Our overall assessment was that S facing slopes were relatively stable and that N facing slopes have a persistent slab sitting on top of a weak faceted layer at ground level.  Based on that assessment we skiied a few laps on S & SW facing slopes 5.4k’ and lower and did not see any other signs of instability.  Additionally there is a heavy layer of hoar frost on top of the snowpack from ~ 3.5-4.5k’ which could cause additional problems after the next snowfall