Cloudy humid day on Stoney Ridge

We went to Stoney Ridge for observations today. Conditions were full cloud cover and humid. There was a low cloud ceiling hanging on adjacent Rubicon Peak and also visible over Heavenly/Jobe/Freel.

The Rubicon Snotel weather station indicated 0.1 inches of precipitation had fallen in this area last night. On our tour, it became apparent that this precipitation had fallen as very light rain up to 7,400'. From this elevation on down, the surface snow was fully wet on all aspects. As we ascended higher, the snow surface dried a bit but was still very moist. It was not until we reached our highpoint of travel at 8,300' that we saw a trace of new snow on the trees. Otherwise, at the lower elevations, there were only a few drops of liquid water on live needle pine/fir tree branches.

We intentionally choose an area of relative shallow snowpack (about 4 feet deep) at 7,420' for our snowpit to look at the layers associated with the recent deep persistent slab avalanche cycle. At this location, there were about two feet of old snow at the bottom from prior to Jan 26 with about 2 feet of well settled newer snow above that from after Jan 26. The layers of the older lower snowpack were wet at this location and gave no signs of instability in snowpit tests.