Wish I Could Stop Talking About That Crust

We went to the northern Whitefish Range continuing our quest to map the 1/13 crust and reactive layers of buried surface hoar.

• We found the crust supportable on all aspects up to our high point of 6950'. It's thinner, about a centimeter, above about 6200' on north aspects, and 2" thick on southerlies all the way to the top.
• Most exposed areas at upper elevations had stiff, wind affected snow. We were able to crack some baby wind slabs in small pillows along the leeward side of ridges. These were failing not on the crust, but in softer snow between layers of drifts. We got no other cracking or collapsing the whole day. We couldn't get much to sluff, even on very steep slopes.
• We dug hasty pits on northeast and southeast aspects around 6600'. We got repeatable propagating test results a foot below the surface in both locations. On the northerly aspect the failure plane was small buried surface hour. In the south-facing pit, our tests failed on small facets above a crust. We also go one propagating result down about a meter below the 12/9 crust. Frequent probing with our poles confirmed that these snowpack structures were consistent across the ridgeline where we traveled.
• We found 2 to 3 inches of light snow above the recent crust at lower elevations, and 3 to 5 inches above it at middle and upper elevations. Thanks to a cold clear night, there's a new crop of small surface hoar growing on the in sheltered, mid elevation terrain.

Because the crust was supportable to our high point, we were comfortable skiing steep terrain back to the sleds while avoiding breakovers and shallow areas where we had an off chance of triggering the buried weak layers.

You can watch the video Here if it doesn't work for you below.