Lots of wind affect in alpine areas but treeline and below offered good turns if you are creative and willing to explore. Some good dust on crust turns in the alpine.
The buried windslab will be hard to trigger but if you are able to get it to go from a thin area, it will produce a large avalanche. Thin windslabs are also being found along ridgelines. At treeline these slabs may step down to the december crust.
Temperatures are cooling slighty on friday with a daytime high around -8C and winds will be light out of the NW. No new snow is forecast for the next while, so sharpen up your edges! As a positive note, the trail-breaking is pretty easy right now!
A few thin windslabs up to sz 1 in gullied terrain were observed.
10-15cm of low density snow is overlying a hard wind affected surface that developed during the previous 10 days of strong winds. Good skiing is being found riding on the crust but you have to be very thoughful about where the wind has been in order to have a good trip down. Watch for thin windslabs in the upper snowpack along ridgelines and be thinking about wide propagations of the underlying stiff windslab if you are able to trigger it from a thinner snowpack area. At 2200m on Thursday field teams were able to locate the 1202CR down 100cm with a distinct layer of facets over the crust. Moderate sudden collapses were observed on this layer making us choose more supported and mellow terrain. We havent seen much avalanche activity on this layer but we dont want people to have it come out of your mind. Dig and look and be curious with the snowpack.
