Top of Moonlight 070317

It appears that spring has sprung in the Cascades with free air temsps at 11.2 C. Hopefully it will cool down and we will get more glorious powder before it is really too late.

Although it was only a test pit, I took a number of temperature observations.

Surface- 5.3 C

20 cm - 0.9 C

40 cm - 0.8C

60 cm - 0.7 C

80 cm - 0.6C

100 cm - 0.6 C

120 cm - 0.6 C

140 cm - 0.6 C

For all intents and purposes this can be considered isothermal.

I had difficult determining layers and crusts, and to be honest, should have paid more attention to the crusts, elusive though they were.

I did not however find any real weak bonds, Compression Test yielded nothing and attempts to pry apart the snow column provided a very low quality shear near 100 cm which I believe had no bearing on anything, since this was not a real Shear Test.

We did notice numerous sluffs of the top 5 cm.

Also noteworthy was the difficulty of making crystal observations in the warm air and sunlight.