Route today was up Kessler, NE-facing Kessler slabs, N-facing God's Lawnmower. First time this season into this terrain and unsurprisingly was finding similar snow structure to what I have been seeing at similar elevations in adjacent drainages. Several quick pits just to identify the structure, and overall was finding 100-120 cm snowpack with faceted layers throughout, sandwiched between 4F-hard slabs. No collapsing or cracking. The missing ingredient was a slab on top with enough of a load to activate these buried weaker layers. General feeling was overall Low danger where we were traveling. This is fairly steep terrain, so before committing to anything we used ski cuts on rollovers, and were constantly looking for recent wind drifts from the Sunday night/Monday wind event. There were some small wind pockets on N-facing God's Lawnmower, and one 10 cm wind slab easily broke out from a ski cut. But these were not that widespread where we were traveling and would fall into the "very manageable category" as described in Drew's excellent blog entry regarding hazard ratings.

We skied out by late morning, and were just beginning to feel the effects of the sun on the snow. I imagine solar aspects were becoming active in the afternoon.