Have spent the past few days looking at storm snow instabilities and the past two days I was getting clean shears in different layers in the top 60 cms, but today they seem to have settled out.

I dug one pit down on a north aspect at 9,200' with a HS (height of snow) of 245 cms and the November facets and layer of facets around the dust layer from a wind event earlier in December are both 4F+ to 1F- in hardness, indicating they are gaining strength as the deep snow coverage removes the temperature gradient and also helps sinter the weak layers. The dust layer is down 1.5 meters and the November facets are about 75 cms from the ground. The slab on top is 1F and moving to pencil hardness.

What does all this mean? The snowpack is deep and moving towards stability where we were looking. But, there are still both natural and human-triggered avalanches failing within the storm snow and November facets and this is an indication that we have not moved towards stability everywhere. I'm still going to give the snowpack further time to adjust to this huge load.

Fortunately, the lower-angled slopes are providing superb riding conditions and there are no reasons to push out onto steeper slopes.

Looking up into alpine regions of White Pine and Maybird, the only avalanche activity we saw was sluffing on steeper slopes.