Spent the day touring around several aspects in Cardiff Fork. Overnight winds had their way with upper elevation snow. Most exposed slopes on all aspects were either densely wind affected or cross loaded. Upper Cardiac had some large cross loading ripples visible from a few miles away. Fresh wind drifts were very sensitive and shooting cracks and loud collapses were the name of the game. On a positive note, there was a lot of beautiful sastrugi to look at.

We dug a snow pit on a west facing aspect near the top of the Tube and exit of the Hallway Couloir. We had traveled in that area immediately prior to the storm and were pretty confident there wasn't any faceted snow in that area. Most of the skin up the snow structure consisted of new snow on a heavily consolidated base block. However, as we got just below the cliffs in a more sheltered terrain feature, we started to feel poor structure. We dug a hasty pit and found 30cm of dense new snow on top of 30cm of facets. I'm guessing this was a bit of an anomaly in that immediate area, but there is a chance you could stumble onto a similar, but larger, pocket that might produce an avalanche. Best to be avoided right now.

We decided to switch aspects to see if we could find better snow in the east facing sheltered trees to the south of George's Bowl. While walking along a low angle sub-ridge next to a small north facing slope (100 yards south of Montreal Hill), we unexpectedly triggered a wind slab that cracked 30ft wide and ran 75-100ft to the bottom of the hill. Without realizing it, we had just stumbled onto a perfect test slope. This particular terrain feature is large enough to produce a visual result, but small enough that any action would be harmless.

The biggest take away from today is that the wind has now created a dense (and connected) slab of snow that is resting on top of weak facets in a lot of areas. Perfect setup for a slab avalanche that breaks above you. I would expect that during and after the next storm cycle we will see more sizable avalanches.