I choose no avalanche problems because there are not many right now, at least where I was.

I was out with a video crew doing an avalanche education project. I dug a snow profile for them on the crown face of an avalanche that probably occurred this past weekend on Friday night or Saturday morning. The avalanche was on the north facing side of the Patsy Marly ridge draining in to Grizzly Gulch. The debris barely made it to the groomed cat track. The avalanche was 200' wide and about 1.5 feet deep, 40 degree, north facing slope, 9,600'.

The snow profile showed that the storm snow instability from the weekend was completely settled out and I could not get any failures on that layer, nor any other significant failures in 5 column compression tests in the top 1.5 meters of the snowpack. So at least right there, things looked pretty solid. We skied an adjacent slope of about 33 degrees.

After the project, I zipped up to Patsy Marly summit (10,700') for some exercise and there was some minor wind loading of new snow in lee terrain but it was very shallow and soft and really posed no problem.

I know a place like Grizzly Gulch pretty tame compared to some of the more radical terrain in the Wasatch and it often has more stable snow. Today was no exception. I'm still suspicious of the steep, rocky, shallow snowpack terrain, where there are more faceted snow layers closer to the surface. But most slopes seem stable especially compared to the very weak and unstable snow we've had for most of the winter up to now. I love this time of year.

The sun is supposed to come out tomorrow, so watch for wet avalanches as things heat up.