Mostly sunny and cold for the majority of the morning. Increasing clouds around noon made for partly cloudy conditions. We were back at the car around 1:00. Essentially zero wind experienced.
We triggered a few dry loose avalanches D1 or smaller on steeper slopes. They all ran at the base of the HST.
Snow was shedding from trees and rocks and triggering some loose snow below, none of which was large enough to be consequential.
We found widespread surface hoar in the morning which started to get knocked down on sunny slopes as the day wore on. On shaded slopes, it skied extremely well when combined with the storm snow, making noise and providing smiles.
Hand pits were unremarkable in most locations, with the storm snow lacking much cohesion above the 3/22 interface. This melt-freeze crust was thicker and more supportable on sunny slopes than on northerly/shaded as expected. Digging on a N aspect around 6300 feet, I found that there are two very thin (1cm) melt-freeze crusts in the upper snowpack which drove most of my test results. The upper 3/22 interface was the culprit in our human-triggered loose slides. The snow was moderately bonded with a slightly stiffer 2cm (4F layer) below the 16 cm (F) surface snow. Beneath the 3/22, I found 7cm of 4F snow before hitting the 3/14 MFcr. It was at this interface where my compression and extended column tests were failing medium (CT18, ECTP13). I was surprised to see propagation in my ECT. There are fragments of weak snow at most of our major interfaces, but test results were not consistent and there is a favorable 1F to P hardness profile below the 3/14.