There were many signs of instability today in the La Sals. An exciting day for snow nerds to go skiing.

These signs included what we saw, felt, and herd.

We HERD whumfing when the recent storm snow and wind slap collapsed. It was collapsing on both the old low density storm snow and some faceted snow underneath. We also herd the wind howling through the trees. There were not huge pillows of snow balancing on tree limbs like there was after the last storm, the wind did not allow for much snow to hang out on the trees this time.

We FELT those same collapsed mentioned. We felt a very punchy and often unsupportable snow surface. If you left the compacted skin track on the Laurel ridge you could easily noticed the upside down snow structure. Also a simple ski pole probe highlighted the upside down nature. Last weeks snow was rather low density, this storm has not been. The more dense and more cohesive snow at the top is probably a combo of wind loaded snow and wetter more cohesive storm snow making a great slab on top of what's underneath.

We SAW cracks around our feet as we traveled through new snow. We saw stellar snow flakes, as well as partially formed graupel snowflakes. We also saw white frosted tree branches. This frost was growing on the top and bottom of the branches, and even on one side of my ski poles. This rime event was creating the graupel and frosting the trees. By the time we left the graupel had not accumulated very much, just a few noticeable balls on top of the fresh snow.

Skiing was better than I expected (North Woods vicinity). Was able to make turns and stay on top of the snow, despite difficult skinning at times.

Below is rime on snowflake/graupel, rime on trees, (hard to see) cracking/collapsing after a ski cut, cracking adjacent to skin track.