Woody Ridge

I skied up Republic Creek this morning, and found all kinds of wind-affected, heavy snow. Stepping off the skin track in meadows consistently produced whumphing, and trees showed a few cms of settling around their bases overnight. I observed 4-5 natural slides on wind-loaded slopes, with crowns up to 3’. A pit on a west aspect around 9200’ had a dense slab of new snow overlying facets from our last bit of high pressure, and produced an ECTP13 at the new/old snow interface with a fast, clean propagation. I climbed 1-200’ above this, looked around at the mature whitebarks bowing in the wind, wondered what I was doing out there, and went home.