A badly needed dose of new snow was the news today, but not near enough to keep you off terra firma if you turned to hard. The new snow was light density and right side up. The new load did not seem anywhere close to enough to activate the buried facets at the bottom. The lack of a slab or any wind loading was apparent with no avalanche activity noted. I specifically went to a place with old faceted snow capped with yesterdays thin wind crust or slab to see if it was active, dug a quick hand pit in the starting zone of the main north facing shot off the top of Rocky Point at about 10'500ft? upon isolation nothing would move, but a little tap from the hand would produce a clean, easy shear on the facets under the thin wind slab. The question is not do we have a weak layer? but how much of a load is it going to take to activate it. this weak layer only exists on high north facing terrain with previous snow, most other aspects don't have this problem. It was possible to get the snow to crack out on this weak layer while hiking but from lack of load it wouldn't move.

Photos: hand pit, the thin wind slab or crust that the new snow was failing under [ all failures took the crust and left the 6 inches of facets underneath, pit location, cracking while hiking.

Hazard will depend on new snow amounts and wind transport, it seems like nothing will be active unless we get a wind slab on top of the weak layer or a lot more of a load, that being said I would not trust a high north with any sort of connected slab or wind load on it because the ride will be ugly with such a thin snowpack. Thinking low tomorrow unless we get more snow or wind.