Morning tour in Meadow Chutes with density inversion sitting 5-10 cms (2-4") above old snow surface as the weakest layer. Some cracking within storm snow, especially where there was fresh wind-drifted snow. At 0830 I was unable to isolate a column on a steeper test slope, however when exiting at noon, I could easily isolate columns on similar test slopes, so it appeared density inversion had largely settled out by mid-day. Most of the aspects we were traveling on were E/SE where the storm snow was sitting on a 5 cm supportable crust with damp grains beneath. No collapsing and the only hazard I was leery of were fresh wind drifts. In that scenario, there was

- bed surface (old crusted snow surface;)

- weak layer (lighter density snow sitting just above bed surface;)

- slab (fresh wind drifts.)

However wind drifts were shallow (at most 5-10 cms) and not that widespread. Ski cuts on suspect terrain were quite effective at mitigating this hazard.

Exiting Meadows was able to look at some northerly terrain between 9000' - 9600' and like what others have been reporting, there is spatial variability. On the northerly aspects there are several crusts in the top 50-75 cms of the snowpack, with DF's (and possibly some faceted snow) sandwiched in between. At the elevations where we were traveling there wasn't enough of a new load to activate these buried weaker layers, but it may be a different story on northerly aspects in upper elevation alpine terrain where there has been more wind loading. Certainly a structure worth watching during this hopefully prolonged stormy spell.