That's some soft snow you got there

We toured in the Lake McDonald area looking for instabilities in the storm snow and to check on the changing character or the holiday weak layers.

• We saw several recent and new loose dry sluffs in very steep terrain and had very small sluffing from ski cuts. Recent sluffs, that probably ran yesterday, we up to 20 feet wide and ran several hundred feet. New sluffs today only entrained the top few inches of the new snow and didn't run very far at all.
• We saw evidence of recent southwesterly winds - small cornices and pillowy drifts just below ridgelines. We didn't make it that high today with all the deep trail breaking. But we saw no new drifting, and at middle elevations there was not wind. We couldn't find slabby snow anywhere in our travels.
• We tracked the top-most holiday crust, which is now pencil hard and down between 60cm and 1m deep and found on all aspects and above about 5,000'. We did get propagating results with hard force under the crust in our snow pit. The snow above the crust is soft. The weak layer under the crust is a mixture of decomposing snowflakes, faceted snow, and maybe a few broken surface hoar feathers. We didn't experience any collapsing or cracking, and saw no evidence of recent slab avalanches.
• We felt comfortable skiing steep powder while keeping each other in sight and avoiding slopes above terrain traps. We kept to open slopes away from confined gullies so that we could always escape the moving debris of the small sluffs we triggered on the way down. We took extra care to stay away from tree wells.

video in the works.