Beehive/Bear

Erika and I skied into Bear Basin from Beehive today and then skied Island Boy off the north side of Bear Claw and finished up with a lap on 10602. There was more new snow than any of the Big Sky or YC stations reported, around 8” in the alpine, more where last night’s northerly winds had blown it in. We bailed on the Bolivian Face off of 10602 when I triggered two micro windslabs on the traverse out to the couloir, they were slow moving and somewhat stubborn but still kind of a show-stopper in terrain that exposed. Otherwise we found the new snow to be fairly dense and bonded well. There was an intermittent graupel layer between last night’s snow and the storm snow from earlier this week that we noticed on the up track out of Beehive as well as the south side of Bear Claw. It seemed mostly isolated to the gut of the couloirs and didn’t have any noticeable affect on stability, but I was surprised to see it given the colder temperatures this past week.