The primary concern today was the new snow instabilities. We toured up Butler Fork to get a look at both East and West-facing aspects in the mid-elevation band. The Park City ridgeline/Mill Creek zone has been a bit thinner and a bit more suspect compared to the upper Cottonwoods. So I also just wanted to check snow depths and the overall location of the facets. On the East-facing aspect, below the ridgeline and out of the wind zone at 8450', we found a surprising 250cm of snow. It seems like that area got heavily favored in this most recent overnight system, being a little lower in the canyon and elevation. The top 90 cm was soft, fist to four-finger hardness snow. There was noticeable graupel 10 cm down within the soft snow. On this aspect, we did not find a notable crust; the hardness just slowly increased to 1F, and we did not dig down to the ground until we reached the 1F snow, which represented the new snow/old snow interface. On the East-facing aspect, we got ECTX, and no other instabilities within the surface snow. No collapsing, and no true cohesion in the layer.

On the west-southwest-facing aspect, also below the ridge at 8370', we found a shallower snowpack of 170cm. Similarly, the snow pit had 65 cm of soft snow, fist-hard to four-finger, but this time it was sitting atop a knife-minus hardness solar or melt-freeze crust 5cm deep, on top of a pencil-hard layer. Even with the shallower snowpack and supportable crust, we got ECTX again, no obvious cohesion or collapse.