Excellent surface hoar hunting at lower elevations.
The melt/freeze crust from 1/6 is quite variable in thickness from location to location. This crust is more developed than what I have been finding in my travels but interesting to me is that this is from a north facing slope at 10,200 ft. Easy, clean shears on this layer in this location. Small grain facets on both top and bottom of crust.
Traveled from 7400-10,300 ft., all aspects, slope angles to 38°. New snow instabilities seem to have settled out in the area I was traveling. Clean shears in CT's but with moderate to hard effort. I could not get a fracture to propagate in any of my ECT's on East and North facing slopes. Still not the best snowpack structure.The snow surface is definitely weakening so we'll have to keep an eye on the new snow forecasted over the weekend. Wind will be the other factor to keep in mind as the wind was moving snow today and forming wind slabs, albeit shallow ones where I was.
