Always nice to have a storm come in on the high end of expectations - with decent accumulations last Tuesday/Wednesday, this makes 2 in a row that exceeded expectations of a storm that was forecasted to split.

Today's route was Catherine's Area - cruising along Rocky Point and exiting So Long. Dug about 10-12 pits (they are pretty easy to dig to the ground) and was finding the following:

- The snow that fell Nov 11/12 (last Tuesday/Wednesday) was not as weak as I was expecting. I haven't looked at any snow since last Wednesday, but I am guessing the warm temps and relatively short duration (4 days) inhibited the faceting process. This layer is largely decomposing fragments with some faceting. Unsurprisingly, I was not finding any of the surface hoar that people noted last Thursday.

- The weakest snow continues to be the old snow down at the ground. These are 1-2 mm facets and depth hoar (with some striations on the depth hoar) and the layer is about 5-15 cms thick on northerly aspects. In all my pits I was either getting a failure down at the depth hoar layer upon isolation, or very easy shears at this layer (STV or STE).

- I also was finding a few temperature crusts on W aspects with facets below.

Take home message for me is that (1) the weakest snow is down near the ground, and (2) the snowpack on any slope above 9000' facing NW through NE can be presumed to have weak snow underneath.

I don't think today's storm was enough of a load to trigger these buried weak layers, but any bump in wind loading on Northerly aspects may create more sensitive conditions.

This isn't the end of the world, and typical early season conditions often include this type of weak snow that forms from Fall storms. I was pleased to see the storm snow from last week didn't look as weak as expected.

Happy winter everyone!