What a beautiful day up in the La Sals! At 230pm, we reached the gold basin parking lot and found the temperature to be quite nice sitting around 25 degrees. It was warmer than Moab and the inversion became more and more obvious as the day progressed. I’ve included some pictures to show the inversion down below the mountains. Didn’t dig in the snow today but made plenty of observations of factors that may contribute to more instability throughout the season. First, the wind scouring is obvious on south and westerly slopes up on the peaks which means you’ll find wind loading on the more north and easterly aspects. We watched the wind blow the snow around at various summits today. Second, there is some stout surface hoar developing after calm, cold, and humid nights following the recent snowfall. The open areas away from the insulating tree cover showed the greatest surface hoar growth of up to 1cm at times. In other areas, wind had already swept through destroying the fragile surface hoar and had begun the process of randomly transporting and burying this notorious weak layer. This could prove to be another problem for our snowpack as more snow falls on top of that. Overall, the snow was beautiful and plentiful!!!! Really much deeper than I had expected (around 40-50cm in the areas I traveled today). We shall see what happens as more snow is projected in the forecast.