Observation: Turnagain

Overcast skies with light snow flurries, light North breeze and warm temperatures (upper 20'sF).

6-8" of low density snow sits on a wet layer from the Jan 26 storm that is beginning to freeze. This light surface snow is from instability showers during the past 24-hours, post the warm wet and windy event on Jan 26 that brought rain to the Pass.

We could not see any recent avalanche activity on the Repeat Offender slide path. Other slopes along the Southern portion of Seattle Ridge have slide, but not this area.

We dug one pit near the up-track around 2,000', 160cm HS. We found one layer that propagated in an ECT test, ECTP 30+ SP. This was the old surface snow prior to the Fan 21st storm. It was 2.5' deep and seemed hard to get to fail but definitely propagated when it did.

The bottom of the pack is made of rounding facets from pencil to 1F hardness. The bottom 20cm is moist facets, 1F hard.

Bottom line: Our pit was a bit too low to really represent the slide path above, but with touchy avalanche conditions this is the closest we felt comfortable getting today. There is still very little information for above treeline snowpack conditions. The lower elevations, below 2,000', are freezing over and no signs of instability were noted.