We dug a hole on a 30 degree, due west facing slope at 9400' along the lookers left side of the Cabin Run, about halfway up the open slope. HS of 120 cm. ECTX, with 10 bonus bangs from the shoulder, although the column was easy to pry off the ground. Basal snow in this location was angular, ~3 mm depth hoar that to the naked eye looked like it was just barely starting to round; it wasn't dry, but it wasn't exactly wet. No other formal tests although we noticed a pretty clean, planar shear about 20 cm below the surface underneath the extremely dense storm snow that started falling January 4th. Aside from these two layers, there were no significant hardness changes in our snow pit and things looked pretty good.

Unsuprisingly, within about 300' of the ridge on Cabin Run and presumably all of west facing Gobblers, the snow gets thinner and the dense layer from the middle of last week becomes a knife hard rime crust. Consequently the basal grains are drier, larger, and even more angular; they almost felt like grains of road salt.

Especially but not exclusively in thin snowpack areas, I think the January 4-7 layer of very dense snow could create a nasty impedence layer that exacerbates weakness below it and creates an excellent bed surface for future avalanches. As Greg pointed out in his observation from January 9, the light density snow from overnight 1/8-1/9 is already faceting, and with both a firm crust and this weakening snow above it well distributed across all aspects and elevations, the ingredients are there for a complex mid-season snowpack when it starts snowing again.

Despite all the caveats, things look better than we thought they would in what was our first trip to upper elevations outside the upper cottonwoods this winter. We did notice a large avalanche in north and northwest facing terrain at the head of Alexander Basin presumably from the natural cycle that occured ~1/7 during strong winds and epic PI.