I was in Cardiff on Saturday and am some what amazed at how fast the wind skins and thin wind slabs have broken down in two days. The hard slabs and breakable crusts have faceted rapidly with cold clear nights and somewhat warmer days and skinning has become a slippery battle with gravity. Dug a pit in the starting zone of Cardiac Bowl right where the skiers right ventricle opens into the main bowl. The pit was a little different from what I have been seeing in the last week, the reason being that there are fumaroles in both chutes leading into the main bowl so the depth hoar at the bottom of the pack is damp and compactible and the weakest layer is about a foot off the ground where there is a layer of faceted snow that last weeks new snow is resting on, I could not isolate a column on this layer. It doesn't really matter at this point because the snow in the main bowl is completely rotten and I'm almost positive that if it slid on the mid pack weak layer in the chutes it would step down and take the whole slope out to the ground in the main bowl. The protected shady N is becoming unsupportable rapidly. Some pretty decent sized surface sluffs are also running in steeper terrain due to the surface faceting.

Photos: skier triggered sluffs in steep terrain on LSB, snow pit in Cardiac Bowl, wet activity off the rocks on SE facing Hansen"s