All Quiet on the Western Front

We toured in central Glacier Park, west of the Divide, to get an idea of what the upcoming warming may do to the snowpack.

• Yesterday's sun left a crust on the surface to 6,000 feet. The crust is about 2cm thick and 1F hard in the most open, exposed, or steep lower elevation areas, and about 1cm thick and about 4F soft on middle elevation exposed, sunny slopes. It stayed in tact through the warming today except below about 4,500' where the surface started to get moist after 230pm when we could trigger a few rollerballs.
• Where there was no sun crust from yesterday, we found relatively low density snow on top of the last sun crust from mid month. 2-4" on lower elevation sunnies and 6-8" on middle elevation solar aspects. At upper elevations we found up to a foot of very soft snow above settled and wind affected snow that was denser and spongy.
• We tested cornices to see if they are primed to fail if temps climb later this week. There are a lot of big cornices perched atop ridgelines at upper elevations. They were stubborn, but it didn't take too much stomping to knock them off leeward test slopes. There were no reactive wind slabs for them to trigger when they fell, just some minor sluffing.
• We couldn't find any major signs of instability after a lot of looking. We did avoid the rockiest alpine faces with cornices above, but we felt comfortable skiing very steep terrain at all elevations.