Today we traveled mostly on northerly slopes and found a lot of air in the snowpack in sheltered areas and steered well clear of areas that had any wind deposition. It seems like a lot of the weak layer interfaces have been obscured by ongoing faceting processes which has helped stability overall in sheltered areas temporarily... but there is a lot of weak snow out there! Any areas with surface consolidation seem highly suspect.

We observed a fairly strong temperature gradient through the middle and upper snowpack and it seems any sintering is unlikely on high northerlies. Stability tests showed a lack of propagation in our pit but again we didn't have too much of a slab where we were. I would imagine an upper snowpack weakness we found down about 30cm on small grain facets to be a most likely player. This said we had results with compression tests into basal facets near the ground, but these did not react in ETC tests. I wouldn't be surprised to see an avalanche break on either layer in the wind zone or perhaps an avalanche in the upper snowpack stepping down to near ground.

We stayed in sheltered areas and on terrain to low 30 degree range and found terrific snow surface quality. The pack is still fairly shallow though (HS ~130cm) at 10400' so watch for sharks and expect further weakening of the snowpack for some time.