We rode South of Tony Grove Lake today. Lots of new snow; 30ish inches in the last 10 days. The snow was a bit inverted so you needed steep slopes to ride but avi danger was high enough that we didn't dare get on anything too steep...

We dug a pit on a Northeast facing slope around 8200 feet. 36 inches of total snow on the ground. Compression tests produced a failure at 2 and 3 taps about 12 inches down near the old/new snow interface below this latest storm snow. The failure was not a clean shear but was very easy to collapse. We had a Compression test failure at 12 and 13 taps above the hard rain crust from early November. When we did the Extended column test; the column collapsed at 6 taps around 12 inches down but didn't really move and it was hard to tell if it even propogated all the way across the column. We could not get the column to fail at the Ice crust even after 30 hits.

There was lots of cracking around our tracks on every run. The cracking was limited to the upper foot of snow

The weather was pretty gnarly. On the way in, it was blowing so hard there was zero visibility and we had to stop to wait until the winds subsided. Also, up top on the ridgelines it was cold and windy with our tracks filling completely in between runs.