Decided to go with the sled to travel into the Whitney area and condions are quite thin and most folks are opting for the wheeled vehicles. Even near the Double Hill area there is only 10-12", with slightly more snow with the help of wind drifting.
Double Hill went through a shallow natural avalanche cycle likely during the Saturday storm. There was not much of a snowpack leading up to this recent storm, but enough wind deposited snow along the ridgeline to overload the weak shallow snow.
The poor snowpack structure is quite evident with strong snow over weak snow. The two ECT tests I performed resulted in one column failing when I was cutting the back and and the other result was an ECTP with just two taps from the wrist.
A couple photos of the upper Whitney Basin where the snowpack looks a little deeper and does quite well with a northwest flow type storm.
