Bury the bush

Today's tour objective was to sort out what kind of mess has been playing out in the Middle Fork since the storm started.

• Arduous trail breaking through 2+ feet of new, dense snow and periods of intense blowing snow were our biggest red flags today. 
• Flat light limited our views of surrounding avalanche activity, but we could see a few fresh-looking debris piles that had blazed a path across alder-rich low elevations. D2 in size.  
• The snowpack was relatively quiet underfoot, but produced some cracking in wind drifted pockets behind trees. It also gave propagating test results down 3 feet on the 12/31 interface, which appeared to be a mix of stellars, facets, and broken surface hoar grains.  We weren't able to travel into areas that were receiving heavy windloading today, but we could see it happening.  
• We kept our terrain choices to simple, low angle slopes or very dense trees without overhead hazard.