Poor Snowpack Structure

The primary red flag is snow surface in advance of the incoming (hopefully) snow. In many places there was a widespread breakable crust above weak facets. It would easily break around your skis while trail breaking (see photo below). You could pick up parts of the crust and see facets attached to it and easily find loose facets. If this gets a load of new snow, this could create a failure plane for future avalanches. In more protected there was less of a crust above the old facets but there has already been enough snow and warming to create a snowpack with stronger snow above weak snow. See photo with glove below.