A bit surprised this morning to find about a foot of new in Mineral; kind of thought that mid-elevation would not have gotten much. Also a bit surprised to see that there's a dust layer at the bottom of the new snow that must have blown in from Nevada or somesuch; hopefully it's not toxic dust from the GSL lakebed that's getting deposited onto our future drinking water. Though I know dust layers are bad for a couple of reasons, color-coded layers are helpful for an avy gumby like me. The bonding of new snow to old seemed decent at the mid-elevation slopes in the drainage, but was worse up high, despite the fact that there was not a lot of wind-effect in Mineral (again, a bit surprising since it's a bit of a haven for winds; perhaps since the prevailing winds last night were more from the south?). As such, we avoided a steeper N/NE facing roll just down off the ridge, though later ski cuts indicated it probably would have just been a big sluff and not a slab.

Again, what happened on Thursday is not nearly as important at this point as what is going to happen on Friday. Given the forecast it seems like it has the potential to be "too deep"; that is, it's deep enough that in order to get enough pitch to ski, it might be steep enough to slide, tho today was plenty fast and the Thu night/Fri storm sounds colder, so if it's "too deep" at least it'll be right side up. But adding more swift load to what came in for today makes me a little nervous; I got chased out of Porter Fork on Monday by naturaling due to too much snow too fast. Whether it's lake effect or just really vigorous fronts this parade of high precip intensity events has made me more nervous than usual about new snow bonding. And with anticipated 2-3 feet total the difference between sluffs and avalanches gets a bit blurry but their effect can be similar.