I ran into a couple lads digging a snowpit, which really warmed my heart. They recognized me and we chatted for awhile and I took advantage of their pit to poke around a bit. Yep, the depth hoar layer is still on the bottom but much of it is damp and warm so it's gaining strength quickly. They did two Extended Column Tests with no propagation on one and a propagation on another at 24 taps. Total snow depth was estimated at 120 cm, which seemed typical for that area. So it's getting much harder to get these columns to fail especially from a week ago when everything would collapse and the columns failed just sneezing on them. Caveat: this pit was slightly south of east facing so the buried depth hoar was probably not as developed as a more northerly aspect.

I dug a snowpit in White Pine a few days ago and did not have time to post it, but it was on protected opening on a northeast facing slope about 9800' and the total snow depth was deeper than expected, around 150 cm and I got no propagation on an ECT. It was in the Spire and Dog Dish area.