It's mainly a hall of horrors out there but we did find some nice turns in places. The general flavor of the snowpack is crust. The 2-3 inches of storm snow from earlier this week is scoured off exposed areas and deposited into wind slab in sheltered areas. There is a significant level of variability in the snow surface depending on aspect, elevation and trees vs no trees. Some sheltered shady aspects were facets that skis sank straight through. Ridgetops were windboard and sastrugi. Other slopes were pick-a-type-of-crust.

BUT...we did find excellent skiing on the lower 2/3 of Goldminers where the new 2-3" of snow was in good shape on top of a supportable crust. That will probably be gone after today as sunny aspects were damp by afternoon. There were also decent turns up in Talking Mtn Cirque (lookers left of El Pinche) where the crusts were not as stubborn. A few areas up high have the "etched" appearance with skiable low density wind crust. Those two areas were the exception though. Most of the typical powder stashes in Gold Basin were bleak.