No Name Peak shoulder, snow conditions

After taking a week to visit the San Juans in CO, I headed up to No Name peak to see the state of affairs here. Was able to drive even further up than a month ago and followed my raised track to the north shoulder of the mountain. The risk has grown exponentially and the reward has plummeted in relation to backcountry skiing on the Eastern Sierra right now. It’s not so much skiing as just travelling or hiking in the mountains anymore. A lengthy consistent stretch of snow is hard to find unless you get up high to a few remaining isolated slopes, but getting up there and then out is the hard and dangerous part.

Snow structure for the most part is very bad below tree line with multiple facet/crust combos, submerged hard slab, areas of completely faceted snow and breakable surface crusts. All these issues will likely cause instability if we ever sees a significant load of snow again this season. Got some propagating results on stability tests today around 25cm below the surface, but all within the hard category and a PST did not show a poor rating in regards to propagation propensity.  A vertical block fracture occurred at 55/100cm rather than 30/100cm as shown in the attached snow pit profile, (error I couldn’t edit after submitting).

I would not recommend this area for riding anymore as coverage has significantly dwindled since I visited third week of January.

Snowpit @ 9400ft 0deg North aspect, 34deg slope

Boot Pen: 25cm     Ski Pen: 5 cm

HS: 175cm

CT28 Q3 @ 43

ECTP29 @ 43

PST 55/100 SF