We had a lot of interesting test results today. We dug several pits on a northeast facing 30 degree slope at around 8500-8600 feet elevation. The shovel shear test had energetic shears at 20" depth at the new/old snow interface. Compression tests failed on that same layer (20 inches down) at around 14 taps. The scary failure occurred in the old faceted snow near the ground (about 45 inches down), this layer failed at 7-10 taps. The interesting part is that we did not produce any failures on the extended column test. The results surprised us so we did several ECTs with the same results, no ECT failures on any of the layers.

With all the new snow and the variation in test results we decided to stay on mellow slopes 32 degrees and less. The only other signs of instability we saw were deep cracks on short steep slopes (in the pictures below). The slopes were so short that the snow had nowhere to go and so it didn't slide.

It snowed hard most of the morning and we had 5-6 inches of new snow after we dug pits in the morning. Great day to be in the hills.