What makes a good corn cycle

........ i knew it had to happen eventually

When I think of good corn, it's generally untouched snow that has been through a few freeze/thaw cycles and the prime time to ski it is when it's softened up, but before it's total mush/risky for avvys, I have no idea what temp it achieves this though.

Is this what kids are calling it today?

good corn (aka melt-freeze crust) skiing is dependent not only on weather but on terrain management. To have a good/safe day of corn skiing the crust needs to freeze up at night but the day needs to be warm enough to soften the crust. This means that in the morning the snow will likely be bulletproof and in the late-afternoon slushy. The key is timing. Seek south-east aspects in the morning and south-west faces in the afternoon. North faces typically do no develop good corn skiing as they aren't affect very much by the melt/freeze cycle.

Its also worth noting that it takes several cycles of melt/freeze to develop that 'corn' snow structure. The first melt cycles on the dryer snow will likely be prone to wet-slides. As the snow crystals become larger and rounder the snow will stabilize quickly. True corn snowpacks very rarely avalanche.

If you want to learn more about snowpack I recommend reading "Stay Alive in Avalanche Terrain" by Brue Tremper or take a avi class (read the book since its spring, take an avi class next winter).

a user-comfort cabin, turbocharged engine. thrashing speeds are very fast

Haven't read that book in a while, but isn't the above passage taken directly from it? I Can't remember exactly, and I haven't got that boom to hand at the moment, it just seems reminiscent of the style of the book.

no not straight out, but definitely paraphrasing. I was just rereading through all the wet-slide related passages in preparation for spring.

good post, needs to be upvoted more. i dont know as much about corn as this guy does but i can concur that it's all about several freeze/melt cycles during day and night, and that it's all about timing and what direction certain faces.....face

Solid post! North faces definitely develop corn cycles, but just like you pointed out for other slopes, its a timing game - it could be more than a month later than a south aspect.

Lol! Are you calling plagiarism here?

Another great post, I like seeing this kind of discussion on here.

Semi-related: I made my first charge today (just a 4lb.'r) and tossed that sumbitch into yonder gully. Pretty sure my dick grew slightly. At least in girth.

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA
A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
FACTS AND FIGURES
• The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest
on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that’s
dominated by a single species: Zea Mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know
as corn.
• Of the 38 ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, there are at least 13 that are derived
from corn. 45 different menu items at Mcdonald’s are made from corn.
• One in every three American children eats fast food every day.
• One in every five American meals today is eaten in the car.
• The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States,
more than our cars; more any other industry.
• It takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an
American plate.
• A single strawberry contains about five calories. To get that strawberry from a field in
California to a plate on the east coast requires 435 calories of energy.
• Industrial fertilizer and industrial pesticides both owe their existence to the conversion of
the World War II munitions industry to civilian uses—nerve gases became pesticides,
and ammonium nitrate explosives became nitrogen fertilizers.
• Two out of every five people now alive owe their existence to an invention few of us
have even heard of: The Haber-Bosch process for turning atmospheric nitrogen into
synthetic fertilizer, arguably the most important invention of the 20th century. Without it,
the earth’s population would have stagnated at 1920 levels.
• Because of the obesity epidemic, today’s generation of children will be the first
generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than their
parents’.
• In 2000 the UN reported that the number of people in the world suffering from
overnutrition—a billion—exceeded for the first time in history the number suffering from undernutrition—800 million. The great food problem of our time is that there is too much
of it, not too little.
• Since 1985 America’s annual consumption of High Fructose Corn Syrup has gone from
45 to 66 pounds—not bad for a “food” no human had experienced till 1980. In the same
period, consumption of refined sugar also went up by five pounds; consumption of all
sugars rose from 128 to 158 pounds per person.
• Super-sizing works as a marketing strategy because people presented with larger portions
don’t stop eating when they are full, but rather will eat more than 30% than they
otherwise would. Why? Probably because our bodies evolved in an environment of feast
or famine, when it made sense to eat as much as possible when food was available.
• The cheapest calories in the supermarket are precisely the most fattening. A dollar can
buy 1200 calories of potato chips and cookies, but only 250 calories of a whole food like
carrots.
• The average item of food travels 1500 miles before arriving on an American’s plate.
• The human brain accounts for 2% of our body weight yet is responsible for consuming
18% of the energy we ingest, all of which must be in the form of carbohydrates. Food
faddists take note.
• Cooking is what made us human. By making plants and animal flesh more digestible, it
vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans, a nutritional bonanza
that probably accounts for the dramatic increase in the size of the hominid brain 1.9
millions years ago.
• Disgust, in the words of one scientist, is “intuitive microbiology”—it helps keep us from
ingesting substances that might sicken us. The substances that disgust all humans all
come from animals—bodily fluids and secretions, corpses, decaying flesh, feces.
Curiously, the one bodily fluid from other people that does not disgust us is the one
produced by humans alone: tears.
• The French Paradox really isn’t a paradox at all. We call it that because the French
experience—a population of wine-swilling cheese-eaters with lower rates of heart
diseases and obesity—confounds our own strange orthodoxy about food. That orthodoxy
regards certain tasty foods as “poisons” (carbs now, fats then), failing to appreciate that
how we eat, and even how we feel about eating, may in the end be just as important as what we eat

CO still has a ~3in layer of depth hoar against the ground in the front range/grand county, it would be hard to trigger a slide but if you did it would be to ground (after this current storm melts.)

After that bottom layer gets solidified, the general rule is that if it freezes over night then its safe until afternoon but obviously that depends on observations ect.

Maybe you aren't old enough to have your parents tell you this yet, but the secret to a good cycle is to sacrifice a female. It's for the good of the harvest, one day you will understand.

Thanks for clarifying.

The transition to corn is definitely a danger point. When a snowpack first becomes isothermal (@ temperature equalibruim and ~ 0C) free flowing water weakens the persistent layers. During this time, as mike stated, the snow on the surface may seem very stable, while a deep faceted layer from the beginning of the season is on the verge of collapse.

Since this thread is now on the topic of instability (as it should be), another good rule to follow is to call it a day once you begin sinking down to your boots.

1- It has become very prone to wet slides and 2- your 'wet-sluff' begins to carve trenches in the pitch, ruining the skiing for the next guy .