Scary Glop

Isothermal, wet facets, rotglop, elephant snot, etc. It goes by many names and you won't forget it if you've dealt with it. We've been dealing with a bit of it here in JH recently. Particularly at low elevation, where our thinner, thoroughly faceted snowpack has gotten wet after consecutive nights above freezing.

Check out this vid from another Greater Yellowstone range. These guys were having fun with a small test slope, in this case, a road cut. As you can imagine, on a larger scale or with a terrain trap, it wouldn't be fun anymore! Note the small trigger getting solid results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=zWpRQzgtL3o

"But I thought wet slides were slow!"

I once skied a line with Sarah and Bondo that I've skied before a couple times, not inconsequential by any means (N F. Democrat), where I had to be very specific about safe zones and vocals. I kicked off, I want to say, 5 big slides and waited and hopped from zone to zone every 6-800 feet. Very "managed" skiing. There's a lot of mass in those ones. Especially with that kind of pitch and vert. I felt like I was doing something that shouldn't really be done, but, it was a methodical cut release ski situation. Not really a good place to fuck up either, that far out.

Old photo, crappy image, and lots of foreshortening, but you can kinda get the idea, that face is a few thousand large and 38-43 ish:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2113/2...06cb6d00_o.jpg

For instance, that one right off the top is over 1000k, same with the last one. There's a bunch in the middle too. Tail gunning the group, I was literally 5 minutes too late, and would cut, wait, wash, scream heads up to the safe zone, then ski, rinse, repeat. Very calculated, but still, very powerful. Fun hike out too, as always on that line.

http://www.pbase.com/praeesse/image/80759707/large.jpg

Same thing on Elbert, just a bunch less vert:

http://www.pbase.com/praeesse/image/80361787/large.jpg

Yes, I finally learned not to blow out my highlights. Thank god I learned more important things first.

Edit: And I'll take that over persistent isolated deep hard slabs over facets any day of the week.

Cool! You don't see that where I live. Spending time in different snowpacks is so valuable.

Things got pretty exciting around West Yellowstone thurday/friday. Saw a bunch of low elevation 25 degree treed slopes running to the ground. Not huge debris piles, because there was only 40cm of snow before it got hot, but enough to bury a bunch of miles of road.
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Originally Posted by neck beard

Spending time in different snowpacks is so valuable.

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+ one billion

Damn that's scary.

Wow - thanks for posting this. Definitely puts it in perspective.

Thanks for posting. So this is what happens when heavily faceted snow gets thoroughly wet. Guessing it wouldn't matter if it was a prolonged thaw or a rain event, conditions would be similar?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by neufox47

Thanks for posting. So this is what happens when heavily faceted snow gets thoroughly wet. Guessing it wouldn't matter if it was a prolonged thaw or a rain event, conditions would be similar?

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it's typical intermountain/continental non winter shit snow, rob. we sometimes forget how good we have it in maritime land

rog