Went into white pine with the objective of getting eyes on the alpine and assessing the snowpack in an area with a deep snowpack. We dug two pits in North facing, sheltered terrain at 8900' and 9600' both of which had overall good stability within the upper 1 - 1.5 m of the snowpack which was as far as we dug down. Snow depths at each location were close to 3 m. Implications are that we might be turning the corner in areas with deeper snowpacks as our various PWLs become deeply buried. I'm most suspicious of periphery zones and repeater paths as the most likely places to trigger a persistent weak layer avalanche.

While we didn't travel in the alpine today, we observed many recent tracks off the N side of Lake Peak, as well as some tracks on Red Baldy. The crown on Red Baldy that was reported on 2/21 seemed to be filling in from blowing snow. Conditions in the alpine are still looking pretty thin for February with quite a bit of wind affect.