Two weekends ago, my wife and I were skiing with the kids at Eaglecrest Ski Area. One windy trip up Ptarmigan redefined the weather limit of little ones for me. I learned young skiers don’t like strong winds and blowing snow.

They are not alone; the snowpack doesn’t like it either.

Last weekend we were trying to figure out if we wanted to go skiing.

It was raining outside and a quick look at the Federal Aviation Administration’s vertical velocity sonar and weather stations across the area indicated that it was also raining up at Eaglecrest Ski Area.

This wasn’t an isolated event.

It has rained a lot this winter. In fact, at higher elevations, it has rained more than I remember in the previous three winters.

When I sat down to write this column, it was easy to decide what to write about this week.

Early in December I was up on the slopes at work digging snowpits in different locations. I was trying to identify the weak layers in the snowpack that were likely to become reactive with additional snow load. As I was moving from one pit to another, I realized that the structure of the snowpack changed drastically from one place to another. Weak layers that were in one pit did not exist in a different pit only 30 to 45 feet away and vice versa. In other words, the snowpack was spatially variable.

Several years ago I would scratch my head, pondering where to dig snowpits before I dove into a slope and skied it. Of course, I wanted a spot that represented the snow on the slope I was about to ski, or as some folks used to say: “dig your pit as close as possible to where you’ll trigger an avalanche without triggering one”. But risking your life trying to make sure the slope you are about to ride is safe seems to be a rather unreasonable way to go about it. Many of us in the avalanche business had been wondering if there was a way to assess the snowpack from a safe place.