Wind Loading

At least where I was, my only concern was the recent wind drifting. But as has often been the case this month, the snow is so dense that there's just not as much snow available for transport and it limits the amount deposited in lee terrain. But with dense snow comes a lot of weight and heft of any avalanche that you may be able to trigger. I get the feeling that you need to give it a pretty good thump to get much going because of the very dense snow. But wind loading was actively occurring today. I didn't take the time to create a snow profile graphic but I'll just discuss it here since the Snow Profile box does not allow freeform text: I dug a quick pit on the NW side of Little Water Peak around 9,400' in the aspen glades down off the ridge a couple hundred vertical feet in a wind protected area. The snowpack seems very homogenous and I couldn't even see or feel any layers in the top 120 cm of the snowpack where I tested. HS = 180cm. I did an Extended Column Test and got no shears or propagation. I did not dig to the ground but I could occasionally feel some weaker snow near the ground in places while probing with my ski pole while traveling especially at lower elevations. I suspect with such a deep, dense snowpack everywhere, there's no temperature gradients across the basal facet layers and they have gained a lot of strength. It seems like the thinner snowpack areas might be the only places where you could get it to break that deep or places with a huge amount of wind drifted load.