Powder hunters

Day off tour hunting for powder skiing. Chose mostly mid elevation slopes without steep, leeward start zones, though they were subject to crossloading.

• 3-4" of new, low density, loose snow camoflaged drifts and slabs formed by Tuesday's wind event. With calm winds today, we saw no additional drifting. 
• Under the new snow, we consistently found a layer of wind-packed snow 2-8" thick and about 4-fingers hard that sometimes felt hollow. This layer was present on both southerly and northerly slopes between about 5000 feet and ridges (~7000 feet). This layer did not produce any shooting cracks or whumpfs, and did not react to ski cuts on steep (35-40*) slopes. We found little to no evidence of drifting from northerly winds. 
• The 2/5 crust is about 8-15" below the snow surface. It's thin and easily missed in hand pits.
• The 2/1 crust is 15 to 25" below the snow surface.
• Hand pits showed a thin failure plane in between the two crusts. The slab above this interface pulled off in hand pits with easy to moderate force. Nearby slopes did not react to ski cuts. 
• We triggered a half dozen small loose dry avalanches in steep, convex terrain below 5000 feet. These moved slowly but entrained snow on the slopes below. They stopped when slope angles eased.

Our first skin track was up a gladed, mid-elevation slope with short pitches of 30 degrees. Our first run was down a similar slope, with a short pitch of 35 degrees. With no signs of instability on this ascent and descent, we stepped out to steep (35-40*), consequential terrain, again with no signs of instability apart from the low elevation sluffs.