Learning about the snowpack and tracking spatial variability in a new zone with the Snow Scope

The Propagation Labs “corporate retreat” took place last week in a remote backcountry cabin in British Columbia. We arrived to a brand new valley to us, untravelled by anyone for the previous week with very few observations or local snowpack knowledge. There was a public avalanche forecast, but the forecast area is huge, and problems were described as spatially variable.

With little knowledge of the local snowpack, we spent the beginning of the week getting oriented with the terrain and doing a ton of poking around in the snow - digging pits to see layer reactivity, and collecting digital profiles with the Snow Scope all over the place to quantify how different the snowpack was across aspects and elevations.

What we found generally lined up with the forecast. A widespread rain crust about 100cm deep, with faceted snow above and below it. We dug about 5 pits down to this layer in various locations across aspects, with consistent no propagation results on it (ECTN). The Images below show a manual hand hardness profile (recorded with beta version of our manual pit recorder) from one of these locations, along with a Scope profile taken in the same location (shown as smoothed and non smoothed).

5 locations across an entire valley is not that many locations, so we compared Scope Profiles from the pit locations to profiles taken in many other (>50) locations. The overwhelming majority of those Scope profiles matched the general structure of pit profiles, giving us confidence that our pit results were representative of the snowpack across the area. A few examples of these profiles are shown below on a map - all clearly showing that Dec 1 rain crust layer.

Examples of a few profiles taken around the valley. White Arrows on each profile show the Dec 1 rain crust

Coming from our home range in sunny and warm Utah, we were surprised to see such similar snow profiles across aspects and elevations. But with a low sun angle and temps that never reached above -22C for the week, it made sense that Solar aspects wouldn’t be that much different than shady ones.

In summary, using the Snow Scope probe last week allowed us to be much more confident in our snowpack assessment of a new zone, without dedicating our entire week to digging pits. As recreational backcountry skiers who typically ski in well forecasted zones, we don’t often use the Snow Scope in this way for personal decision making, but when traveling in new snowpacks or where there is no forecast or observations, it can be an incredibly useful tool. For the professionals who are making forecasts or need to document spatial variability quickly, this week demonstrated just how useful the Snow Scope Probe can be.

Also… the skiing was pretty good too. Happy 2022 from the Propagation Labs team!