Another One Bites The Crust

In a continued effort to bring you the most accurate crust conditions reports, we went up a peak near Essex to find out, yet again, how high the darned thing goes. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Are you standing on the edge of your skis?

• We found the 1/13 crust almost everywhere. It's breakable below about 5,900' making middle elevations downright dangerous skiing. It's, mostly, supportable on all aspects to 6,700'. Above 7,000' the crust doesn't disappear or peter out, it becomes spotty. We found the crust thinner in some places, but still present, on most south to west facing slopes to our high point at 7,750'. On north and east aspects above the same elevation, it was often hard to find.
• Almost everywhere above 7,000' where we could not find the crust, the snowpack is capped by a 6" hard wind board (south and west aspects) or many layers of hard wind slab (north and east aspects). Like the crust, these stiff layers make it hard for a rider to affect buried weak layers.
• We found 2 spots without the crust above 7,000'. Both were on northeast aspects. Both were in rocky areas with shallow (less than 3') snowpacks. Both areas are often stripped by cross winds. In the first area, the snowpack looked like something out of Colorado - facets and depth hoar. In the second area we found a layer of surface hoar buried about 8" down. We suspect that this is the same surface hoar layer that we are finding a foot down in other locations. This layer did not react in our snowpack tests, probably because there's only 8" of soft (4F) snow above it. 
• The avalanche cycle from the 12th and 13th on the surrounding peaks was impressive. Most crowns and starting points were blown over at this point, making it hard to say how many slid, and where they started, but the debris piles were hard to ignore.

We were comfortable skiing pretty steep terrain, one at a time, where we knew we had the crust. We traversed over long sections where the crust was breakable, but we actually found pretty good skiing on an east-facing, sheltered slope where the crust was supportable and there was about 6" of soft newer snow on top.