Who dropped the snow bomb?

Checked out lower elevations in the southern Whitefish Range, to see how the snowpack there has developed with colder weather and recent snowfall.

• We saw the debris or crowns from a few small natural avalanches on southwesterly slopes. Recent snow and flat light obscured the crowns, though they looked to have run late Saturday and to have involved soft slabs of fresh snow. The debris looks to have run mid- to full-track. 
• We found a surprisingly deep snowpack below 5000 feet. 1.5-2.5 m height of snow between 4 and 5000 feet. The snowpack is generally soft and unconsolidated, with few distinct weak layers. These weak layers include graupel and density changes, thin crusts, and a few small facets. None produced propagation in our tests.
• Older weal layers, like the late-December crusts, are buried well over a meter deep; the grains look to be rounding. 
• The snow surface is soft, low-density snow that will be readily hardened or drifted by strong winds. 
• Slope cuts on steep road cuts did not produce any small slabs. 

Low elevation slopes in the Whitefish Range now have more than enough snowpack for avalanche hazards on open slopes, with sluffing and small soft slabs the concerns today.