Gotta be thankful for days like that

Climbed up to the crest of the northern Flathead Range to enjoy the views and generally stable snowpack.

• Surprisingly cold day, except in the sun, which clouds limited. Cold temps, cold wind up high. Beautiful light. 
• We saw a few recent loose snow sluffs, as well as a few moist-wet sluffs on mid-elevation sunny slopes. All described - with a TV weatherman's flair - in another obs from the same area today. 
• Winds overnight and today had drifted in parts of the previous day's uptrack and turns on a steep, leeward slope. The surface snow on this slope felt wind-packed and dense, though not stiff. It did not seem like a slab that would propagate widely, though the last skier in our party saw some snow around her skis cracking while descending this slope. A party who skied the same slope the day previously said the snow quality had deteriorated.
• Large-grained (2-5 mm) surface hoar has formed on the snow surface between roughly 6200 and 6800 feet. These crustals were mostly Cold air lying flat on the snow surface where we saw them. 
• Cold air and inermittent cloud cover limited radiation and heat inputs to the snowpack; we ecnountered nothing but dry snow in this easterly basin, though saw some small rollerballs (detailed by our roving weather and history reporter in another obs). Large cornices stymied us at the top of one run. These were truck-sized and cantilevered over the slope, with one cracked behind it. We consoled ourselves on another equally fine run. Even if we could have gotten past these cornices, I woudn't have wanted to be below them. 
• WIth minimal sings of a warming, wetting snowpack, we skied steep, easterly and southeasterly terrain early afternoon.

We took the hall pass that the mountains gifted us and ran with it, though we still worked to expose one person at a time.