We headed up to ski Raymond Shoulder today, hoping that the southerly tilt to the area and the strong sun might make for safe, fun corn skiing. On the way up we decided to investigate the snow structure, to confirm or challenge our assumptions. After a couple quick hand pits that revealed some suspect facets in the basement, we pulled out the shovel for a better look. We found that this aspect (nearly due east) harbored 8-10" of facets, topped with a cohesive icy layer, some softer snow, another crust and soft snow on top of that. Bottom line, we had a situation of strong over weak - a 2-3 ft slab of varying strengths above 8-10" of large weak facets, consistent with the scary moderate projection in the forecast. We took one look at this snowpack structure, and turned tail down the ridge to ski the wonderful low angle aspens in the drainage instead.

We all know the poor snowpack structure is out there... so this isn't new news. But I shared this observation because neither of us expected to find such poor snowpack structure on that particular aspect (nearly due east, with some southerly tilt to it), which tells me that the spicy snowpack issue we're dealing with may turn up in surprising places.