The day started overcast with light snow, and quickly lowering cloud deck with light snowfall. Steady light snow during the day, picking up at times. This amounted to about 3" by the end of our day at 15:00. Winds picked up from the east, transporting some snow near and above treeline, and visibility became obscured.
In general, we found a snowpack that appeared to be on its way to settling well, or lacking slab structure. However, a couple interfaces of concern could still produce avalanches of various sizes in a variety of terrain:
The 2/11 interface was found 30-50cm down from the surface between 4-6,00ft. It is a thin sun crust on S-W aspects, and produced clean shears with tilt tests, and Sudden Planer shears with hard compression tests at 5,400ft. In one location (W at 6,200ft) we found a layer of very well preserved, large stellars just under this interface (2mm, 4F). Here we got test results that indicated propagation (PST 37/100 (End)).
The mid-January crust/facet complex can be found anywhere from 60cm down at 3,000ft to 120cm+ at 6,200ft. At 3,000ft we found 4F hard facets (weak!!) above the crust under around 55cm of recent storm snow. No tests performed, but observed that these lower elevations have a worse structure than where more than 100cm sits over this layer. At 5,200ft on W aspect we got Sudden Collapse results with deep tap tests, and the grains were large (2mm) facets and melt forms.
The riding remains conditions remain quite good, with fairly deep trailbreaking.