Decided to give Cardiff Fork a go from LCC today, it's possible but a bit spicy, with the thin snow pack it's a rock skis only sorta route. Dug a pit on the Eye Brow, one of the N facing entrances into Cardiff at about 10200ft, total snow pack was about 2ft give or take an inch. Just like a lot of wind exposed places in Cardiff I've looked at in the last week it had the well developed facets at the ground, denser wind slab mid-pack capped off with the Rime crust with the new light density snow on top of that. Also like the other places where I've dug a pit with a wind slab on facets it failed upon isolation on the four inches of facets at the ground, figured there's no reason to do a ECT if you can't even isolate a column. Also consistent with what I've been seeing this week is that if your out of wind exposed terrain on NW through E the pack is unsupportable and the Rime layer is more difficult to identify. I'm thinking if we have a extended dry spell the wind slab might rot out and everything will be unsupportable.

Photos: pit with the facet layer and the rime crust isolated, and the column failure on the facets at the ground, upper Cardiff Fork with blue skies and snowing at the same time, and tread lightly its thin.