We poked around a lot of the Tony Grove area today to get an idea of how the coverage was looking. For the 22nd of December it is looking pretty good but there are still plenty rocks just waiting to take destroy your board of sled.

We dug several pits on a 36 degree Northeast facing test slope around 8700 feet. There was about 65 inches of snow on the ground. The last couple of storms have left a bunch of buried layers, but for the most part the layers are fairly stable. The shovel shear test shows easy failures at the interface between last weekends snow and the 6-8 inches of snow that fell on Wednesday. We also had inconsistent compression test failures at that interface between CT6 and CT13. We observed other failures at less noticeable layers down to 2 feet. The only failure on the Extended column test was 18 inches down in the snowpack at ECTP17. The column did not move when the interface failed and had to be forced to slide after 10 more hits.

There has been a lot of wind since we rode on Monday. Most slopes had been affected by the wind to some extent but we were still able to find good turns, especially on sheltered slopes on the northern half of the compass.