With such heavy snowfall over the past week and lots of large avalanches, the only recipe right now is to simply avoid avalanche terrain. On my field work today, I thought I'd focus on the sun crust that formed Tuesday and yesterday, and see how the storm snow bonded to it. Strong sunshine the past two days created a crust on the southern half of the compass which was buried by snowfall overnight. In several pits today, I was getting clean shears at this interface, shearing on low-density stellars just above the crust (a poor bond). The storm snow wasn't a cohesive slab and I could only get ECTN in extended column tests.

For me, this indicates that any new storm snow and/or wind-blown snow may fail at this interface just above the crust where the crust provides a bed surface.