Today was a far cry from the absolutely phenomenal, deep powder riding two days ago. The new snow was inverted and and very slow. If you didn't keep your speed up you got sucked down into the faceted snow from before the weekend storm. The snow through the day was much lighter and faster making the riding much better in the afternoon.

We dug several pits on a NNE facing slope around 7800 feet. These pits were dug in an area far away from the front range so the snow depth was much shallower than upper elevations and was between 45 and 55 inches deep. The slope angles on these two pits were 25 and 27 degrees. Several columns failed at the ground upon isolation!!! Compression tests failed on a week layer between Sunday's storm and last nights storm between 6-10 taps. There was really only about 6 inches of new snow since yesterday so we weren’t too worried about this failure. The failure of concern was at the interface between the buried surface hoar/Near Surface Facts and the Sunday snow (12-14 inched down). We got failures at 11, 13 and 16 (CT11, CT13, CT16), at that interface. Surprisingly the Extended column test did not propagate at this weak layer. Amy had a partial failure on the NSF layer at 23 taps but it did not propogate. I did get a complete propagation failure at the ground at 23 hits ECTP23. See the video for more details.

We experienced several heart stopping, thunderous, collapses along the upper ridgeline where the slope was heavily loaded from last night's wind event (and still blowing hard today). There were shooting cracks associated with these collapses and you could feel the snowpack give way under our feet.

On the way up the canyon we noticed that about half of the Temple Chutes had slid. They didn't run huge but dry sluffed out. On the way down the canyon we noticed a fracture on the north facing slope in the trees between Ricks Spring and below Hatty’s Bowl. Amy said the crown appeared to be 8 inched deep and 30-40 feet wide.