We toured today on the north end of the Snowbasin periphery, under mostly clear skies, with no real wind to speak of, and relatively warm temps.

My touring partner today called the snow surface a "party mix," which I agree with, provided that you hate fun and don't like parties. Surface conditions were quite variable and definitely had a face for radio (read: ugly) through our tour from approx. 6000-9000ft. Pockets of soft snow tended to be short lived one hit wonders.

There was plenty of firm crust on solars early in the day that transitioned briefly to something corn-like before becoming mashed potatoes and grabby. Polars had variably supportive and unsupportive crust beneath 5-15cm of surface facets--the "square pow" that Greg Gagne mentioned in his recent obs. This combination made for laborious and challenging skinning, with some slide-for-life zones; ski crampons were a welcome addition to the kit several times. At the ridgelines we found old wind affected snow, 1F or P hard, with wind lips and some sastrugi, but little in the way of cornices.

Snow depth was as little as 30-50cm at low elevation and as much as 100-120cm at high elevation, with the middle band in the 70-90cm range. There were plenty of bare patches near rocks and large trees, on solars, and below 7000ft in general, particularly on southerly aspects.

We saw several old D1 wet loose slides (debris from the largest pictured below) at the low elevations. The most recent was perhaps a day or two old, some appearing a week old or more, with vertical tracks ranging 25 to 250ft.

Finally, we also found what appeared to be old snow remaining from the Decemeber 3 avalanche cycle (based on beta from another local observer). We found several feet of deposition in the runout zone for Hell's Canyon (photo below).

A different local observer and I chatted a couple days ago about the approx 10ft of snow he found in the bottom of Cutler Basin that had persisted into October (plenty of which surely made it through November). He reported that the old snow beneath Ben Lomond/Willard had bridged the Cutler Creek and otherwise sat atop large boulders, posing a significant hazard if anyone were to punch through.