Observation from field days on Saturday Jan 19 in USA Bowl and along Park City ridgeline from Scott Hill to West Monitor. And Sunday Jan 20 from Mill D north with exit to Millcreek through Little Water Peak.

Overall recent 45-60 cm settled storm snow is unreactive in several pits dug from 7200' to 10,000' on all aspects. At best was getting ECTN10-15 (no propagation with extended column test), with failures occurring on layer of low density snow that fell early in the day on Wednesday Jan 16. This layer is now buried down 45-60 cms (and more deeply in wind-loaded areas) and difficult to identify. About 90 cms down from the surface is the layer of New Year Facets that formed Jan 1-4, and have been unable to get stability tests to fail on this layer, other than one clean, Q1 shear with STH with shovel shear test (required really pulling on the shovel.)

Stability tests make me inclined to think anticipated Martin Luther King holiday storm to fail within storm snow, or at the interface of the existing snow surface. The wildcard is we did have a lot of natural avalanche activity on Thursday, much of which we are still learning about, and it is possible some slopes that did avalanche are repeater slopes, and have preserved facets midpack or down near the ground, and were covered up by the tail end of the Thursday/Friday storm with low-density snowfall. It is possible/likely these slopes could also avalanche again as well.

On Friday Jan 18 Trent and I were finding damp facets down near the ground up to 7200' as the Thursday storm initially came in warm with a rain/snow line to ~7500'. These damp/wet facets were quite weak and we were getting collapsing on them in lower elevations in Mineral Fork. There is now a 5 cm crust forming on top of these damp facets, with the recent storm snow on top. This is a good sign and we should be able to expect lower elevations where there was a rain-on-snow event to continue to gain strength.