Island Park Obs.
Great riding and beautiful views all day. We did not observe any avalanche activity, but we did not cover much of the range's western portion. We did get some long views from the top of Sawtelle.
In our snowpits, the structure generally looked similar to what we have seen in the Lionhead area. There is a 2-3” thick layer of facets buried 18-24” deep and a layer of facets near the bottom of the snowpack. In the deeper of our two pit locations, these layers are 1F hardness and I guess they are strengthening. However, we did have propagating results in both pits on the layer buried 18-24” deep (ECTP26 and ECTP28) and near the bottom of the snowpack in our shallower pit above East Hotel Creek (ECTP20). Human-triggered avalanches are possible on either of these layers, but we didn’t see evidence (avalanches) that they are hair-trigger or a widespread issue at the moment. Conditions will become dangerous during the next loading event.