Poor Snowpack Structure

Snow in No Name is some of the weakest I have seen, which isn't too surprising. At the top of No Name (9,600') there were some pretty significant drifts. Stomping and digging in one of the drifted areas near the ridge I found the snowpack to be essentially 16 inches of new/wind loaded snow over a thin ice crust, underlain by nearly 2 feet of 4 finger facets. Was spooky to start digging a pit and have your shovel just instantly go through to the ground, as if there was nothing even there. However, actually couldn't get a slab to propagate here as it seemed that even the wind loaded snow was not quite slabby enough (at least when we were out, may have changed later with the rapid loading going on). Structure was scary enough to avoid the most wind loaded portions of the bowl. A separate pit just down the ridge at about 9,400' had a very different structure with several ice crusts. In this pit I could get nice propagation in my stability tests between the upper two ice crusts (Dec 4th and 5th), ECTP 15. This combination is the ticket apparently and is identical to what others found on Little Water, Reynolds, etc. Very different than the Silver/Days/Cardiff areas.