The top 120cm of the snowpack is gorgeous. There are no discontinuities between the layers from the dec 20-25 storms. The bottom 40cm of new snow is consolidating nicely into 1F rounds, as it should. The bottom 20cm is, of course, horrific. Advanced facets with no internal coehsion. It's only been a week since they've been buried, and I did not find any evidence of bonding. I didn't try to isolate a 5 foot column to test it, but I'm sure columns would fail easily. Large slabs with bridging and vegetative anchors... who knows?

This isn't a great picture of the grains, but it does illustrate what the basal layer looks like when you pull a handful out. Almost no cohesion. It is classic "rock salt" depth hoar.

I skied up Big Springs in South Fork today to about 8500 feet. I dug in several spots to the ground and consistently found 140-150cm total snow depth, with about 120cm of that being new snow. No surprise there. Also not surprising was the ubiquity of advanced, poorly bonded facets at the ground.

What was surprising to me, however, was how few large avalanches I saw off of the summit ridge (I spoke with a member of a party that was in Big Springs, but one fork to the north and close to the summit ridge and he reported that there were large avalanches off the summit ridge). I got a good look at half a dozen W facing slide paths with steep starting zones around 9000-9500 feet, and none of them had run during the storm cycle.

My best theory is that there was so little snow in this area before the storms that the facets are very low to the ground where vegetative anchoring might be holding the overlying slab in place. I suppose this is a good thing, but there's no way to test it.

In the absence of a verifiable reason, there are lots of suspect starting zones that have the full load of snow on them in the Big Springs drainage, and I assume others in the area as well.

I did not get any feedback (collapsing, cracking) from the snow today other than looking at the bottom of snowpits, so compared to the active snowpack reported during the storm cycle, my experience today was definitely quieter. Still, I think I'll give it several more days before sticking my neck out even a little.