Poor snowpack structure remains, and most pits (W-N-E-SE) show about 50 cms of facets at the bottom. In just about all my pits, these facets have been gaining hardness since late January. On Saturday. on a NE aspect at 10,900 feet we observed the facets to be showing signs of rounding. Today's pit also shows rounding facets that continue to gain hardness. We are starting to stack a good amount of snow above the Decemeber and November facet layers. I found the December layer 109 cm below the surface. It is becoming hard to effect these weak layers with extended column tests. I got an ECTX. This is all good news, and is evidence that our snowpack is headed in the right direction.

I conducted two Deep Tap tests and got DT22 SC, and DT21 SC, both failing in the F+ hard November facets. The number of taps is important, but generally we conduct Deep Tap tests to look at the fracture character. SC stands for Sudden Collapse, and this is not a good result. Sudden Collapse results are often correlated with skier-triggered slab avalanches that are big enough to injure or bury a person.