When the skies cleared, it was obvious a good bit of wind loading had occurred during the storm. Northerly aspects were looking fat and pillowy, especially in Upper Dory Canyon above the Pencil Chute and Exxon's. We did not observe any active transport of snow today. I still suspect skiers and riders will be able to trigger a wind slab in the alpine tomorrow, but overall this problem is trending down.

I'll include "New Snow" problems here with wind drifted. The new snow was not slabbed up where we traveled today. We did not encounter any sluffing, but we kept our slope angles low for the most part. I dropped a small cornice on a steep North face above Brumley Creek with no results. On our way out, we skied a short and steep (maybe 40 degrees) North facing shot to see if we would get any sluffing. The snow did not move. This may have been a function of elevation, this slope was around 9,400 ft. We did notice some natural sluffs in the steep slopes of Talking Mt. Cirque around 11,400 ft. By tomorrow, any instabilities in the new snow should be stabilized.

Zoom in on this photo and you can make out the sluffs in Talking Mountain Cirque.

From the top of Noriega Peak we were able to get eyes on some of the alpine terrain around Gold Basin. We did not see any recent avalanches breaking down to the PWL. The series of storms this week put a good load on the snowpack, and the lack of avalanche activity is a great sign that the buried PWL is continuing to gain strength and becoming harder to trigger.