Covered quite a bit of terrain today on Mount Raymond and Gobblers Knob while looking at snow on aspects from southeast facing through north and west-facing. Wind events from this past week did not apparently create any wind drifts where we traveled and the 20-40 cms settled storm snow was soft with no cohesive slab on top. We were able to get one soft slab to pull out on a steep north aspect that failed on weak facets, but it only propagated up to 10' wide, likely due to the slab lacking cohesion.

In looking at the snowpack over this past week and it's clear you need a (1) stronger slab on top of (2) weaker facets for there to be an avalanche problem. We found plenty of (2) today, but nowhere we traveled today could we find a stronger slab on top. I really appreciated Drew's observation from Broads Fork on Friday indicating that finding both the weak layer and the stronger slab on top could be challenging and it requires constant evaluation of the recent storm slab and the old snow surface where you are searching for this poor structure. The photo below shows the typical snowpack structure we looked at today with a soft (fist-hard) slab on top of weak facets.

I haven't been in Millcreek in a month and the snowpack on northwest through northeast aspects has weakened considerably, with the 90-150 cm deep snowpack prior to this week's storms almost entirely faceted. The weakest snow remains the 10-15 cm faceted layer just underneath the recent storm snow, but overall the entire snowpack was quite weak. Am unsure if this will be an issue the remainder of this winter, but it's certainly something I'll remember when traveling in this terrain again.