Spent the day in the southern Whitefish range along with everyone else. The morning started calm, foggy, and lightly snowing. By the last lap at around 2 pm there was light wind with some blowing snow, we could see some blue in the sky, and it was no longer snowing.
We dug a pit on a NE aspect at 6550 feet looking for signs of instablity from the persistent weak layer and for signs of wind slabs. We got CTM (SC) down 15 cm and CTH (BRK) down 40. We also got ECTN 26 down 32 and ECTN 29 down 40. The moderate CT was at the interface between the new and old snow. The old snow was faceted but the slab was only fist hard. The N down 32 was on an interface between storms I think. I was not able to find any surface hoar or obvious weak layer there. The failures down 40 were on top of the mid January crust in some large rounding facets.
We skied beautiful low angle pow on SE through SW aspects. In places with previous wind loading we got some small cracking (see photo). These cracks were only in the new snow (top 15 cm).
