Its encouraging to see the snow stacking up and the backcountry is slowly becoming ridable. However, the snowpack is still thin. What this means is that cold weather seems to be further weakening the facets. They appear larger and striated (having lines from layers of growth) now. We need snow to keep coming to further insulate the facets and stop the faceting process. Photo further below shows the faceted crystals near the bottom of the snowpack.

Photo below shows a middle layer of wind blown snow that varied across this snowpit wall (arrows show the varied thickness of the very hard (pencil+) layer of wind blown snow. There is lots of variability in snow depths and hardness due to southerly winds last weekend as well as winds blowing other days this week. Some slopes have deeper harder snow where the wind deposited snow. Others unaffected by the wind generally have soft snow, and others have shallow snow where winds stripped and eroded snow away.

I walked near a small slope on the west end of the "back bowl" and got a huge collapse and cracks that shot 150-200' to either side of me. The slope was 27 degrees at the steepest, so it didn't slide even though it wanted to.

Went to Mill Hollow after looking at the snow near Wolf Creek Pass. Found similar conditions. Slopes that did not get a stiff layer of wind-drifted snow did not produce collapses, but they did produce similar ECT scores. Also of note is that some of the crusts in between facet layers are decomposing. As the faceting process continues, the crusts are falling apart. The second photo shows the "layer-cake" of crusts and facets.