Steven's Pass Observation 061118

Yesterday’s sortie to Steven’s Pass was great in terms of snow science, but awful in terms of skiing due to a mean breakable crust.
The observations took one hour, based mostly on my rustiness since it has been almost 4 years since I last made and recorded a proper observation. In layman’s terms there is 7 cm of cold snow on top of a hard crust made by the rain event late last week. Under this layer, it was a Very Easy Shear when the column was isolated for a compression test. This elimated the need for a Rutschblock or a Shovel shear test. The rain crust was very strong and acted as a good bridge over this weak layer. I would expect that the rain and warming that occurred last night will further strengthen the rain crust at 1 meter. Also noteworthy is the column isolated under this layer (the bottom 100 cm of snow) was extremely strong and was removed from the pit in a single heavy column. Below is my Snow profile.