I was in Cardiff the last two days; Sunday mid-canyon east facing, Monday upper canyon north facing. I gotta say, this is a strange snowpack. It's slab/unbreakable crust....until it's nice mid-boot powder, then it's dust on crust. It's fat....until you find yourself in shark-infested snow. It's supportable....'til you fall through facet trapdoor into a hole next to a rock. It's great skiing in sheltered trees (if you can find an untracked turn's worth there) and in the wide open above about 9500 north facing, and it helps to be kinda ready for anything on every turn. The Wind is clearly a fickle beast, especially when it comes from all different directions and all different speeds (including high!).

I was a bit surprised to hear about the avies in the neighborhood on Sunday, and feel like perhaps we were pushing it a bit since we were at a similar elevation/aspect, but on each run we/I avoided dropping in from the top and were trying to be conscientious about where the wind-loading/stripping had occurred, but it was so weirdly variable (yet looked the same). So despite seeing some impressively bold lines being skied, after digging a quick hand pit midway up Cardiac where I got nice clean shears at various levels including 2 feet down, we/I generally kept to either lower-angle slopes and/or tried to stay in the fattest (slightly concave) and/or avoided slopes affected by ridges above. Still a little unnerving to me, however, since it's so spatially variable and there are still avies happening even though we seem to have had about 3" of snow over two weeks. I generally like high pressure because of the quietness of the mountains and the lack of avy danger, but this high pressure on this 'pack is weird, and weird spooks me a bit.

Hopefully each day that goes by it will be less weird...though probably til it starts over again once it snows!