Professional Observation- Snowshed/Cameahwait ridge

Today we toured up the Snowshed/Cameahwait ridge.

We found solar affected snow, wind affected snow and recycled powder in sheltered areas.

Sun: 

• The solar affect from the last few sunny days had reached to nearly 8,000 feet.  We found a 1 inch think suncrust that seemed to fade away around 7800 ft.
• We saw a few loose/wet that had run in the lower/mid elevations.
• Rollerballs were starting in the lower elevations.

Wind:

• We saw plenty of wind affected snow, both cross-loading on all slopes as well as top loading on the NE ridges.  Our pits were on SE aspects and N aspects, both with no results.
• We had no shooting cracks or collapsing on an any of our test slopes.  
• We backed off of one SE slope due to quite a lense of older wind-loading, however skied other wind-loaded terrain with no red-flags.

We were still able to find the 2/2 crust buried 1 meter with prominent facets up to 2mm in size above in a NW pit at 5800 feet.  It was unreactive in our test, buts its still down there.