Faceting

[yuckster]

Seems like this has been an unusual year for the Northeast, with (as I have been worried about recently and the below seems to confirm) the snowpack apparently behaving quite a bit like a Continental snowpack due to our long cold snap and all the dry upslope snow we got this year.

Be careful out there.

Originally Posted by Brian Johnston, Snow Ranger

The Lip remains the outcast due to the pronounced weak layers I found hiding under hard slab. As mentioned yesterday, these slabs could be pretty difficult to trigger; however, if an avalanche did occur it would be a deep hard slab avalanche. The upper slab in the snowpack has benefited from solar gain over the past few days and it poses little threat of propagating. The only major concern is if the thicker and colder slabs under them were to be disturbed enough to collapse the weak layers underneath. I think it is likely that you could find these facet layers in other locations in the Headwall area. The Lip catches our attention more due to the consistency of the slab and terrain factors such as pitch and shape of the start zone. If you are into looking at snowpacks and weak layers it is a good time to get into Tuckerman Ravine. Overall we have a stable snowpack with a lot of facets scattered around. It is a good opportunity to poke around and see differences in the relationships of layers as the snowpack varies so much.

[PWDR8S]

Sounds like a great opportunity to check out the layers, etc! Def a twist considering we're a Maritime climate.

[davidhowland14]

this might be the future of NE given climate change and all that...not that bad a change, but we could use some more gnar early season

[yuckster]

I saw a Vermont snowpack referred to as a "temperate continental" snowpack in one snow-science paper:

http://www.easternsnow.org/proceedin...027_Taylor.pdf

I'm no snow-science geek so I don't know what to make of it, but this is interesting. Most of us here in the East assume that our snowpack is maritime and doesn't have the ticking timebomb problem. Maybe that's wrong.

[Affix Snow]

If it rips, it gonna go BIG.

[RR]

Originally Posted by Affix Snow

If it rips, it gonna go BIG.

I'm thinking that we knew there would be problems like that in early January due to weak bonding with the December ice cover....and now there's this other weak layer above that....

So I guess that after going big...there's still a hang-fire potential.