This area has 11 feet of snow (50 inche of water) on the groud - amazing! And the precip gauge at the Farmington SNOTEL site is nearly buried (photo below).

We dug in a lot of places on NE, E, and SE. The new snow is well bonded despite two obvious layers of graupel buried in the upper 1-2 feet. These layers would only break after hard force and would not propagate a crack across our columns. We felt very comfortable traveling under big avalache paths and mainly avoided steep areas near ridgelines and under cornices where all the natural avalanche activity occurred (avy1, avy2, avy3, avy4, avy5). These slides were all slabs of wind drifted snow. Only one may have broken a bit wider and further downhill on one of the graupel layers.

We only found cracking in one place with a sled above another sled track. Otherwise, all the new snow seemed welded in place.