Agusta

Normal caution fit well for this tour. Wet avalanche problems were confined to a few locations that held old drifts left over from the mid-week wind event, and where the snowpack was thinner on steep rocky faces. We got a leisurely start, so the snow surfaces were already soft on the way up. We skied down between 1pm and 2pm. During that time, SE aspects were a slightly past prime, still nice with a 5 to 10cm ski pen, but the sun angle was decreasing on those slopes, creating a wee bit of crisp on top. 

Triggered a few tiney wet loose avalanches. Otherwise no signs of instiblity.

A SE-facing slope at 10,400ft had 35cm of refrozen snow in the morning, which was far from ever breaking down when we passed back through at 2pm. On south and southeast aspects, the upper snowpack had made a nice spring transition up to about 11,800 or 12,000ft. Wet avalanche issues didn't develop here, where the snowpack was average in depth. Shallow and steep rocky slopes had more wet snow available to sluff. The summit face on Agusta had surface snow that was still transitioning and needed more melt-freeze cycles, but our assessment may have been a little off because we were skiing above the old avalanche bed surface across the face. On some SE-S facing slopes above ~11,800ft there was still dry snow below ~5-8cm of moist snow. 

An Easterly facing slope at 11,450ft, had 5cm of moist snow over 15cm of dry snow down to the rain crust. 

The snowmobile was starting to occasionally punch into the snowpack when driving off the side of the Slate River road a couple of times in the afternoon. Those areas still supported boots and needed a little effort to punch through with a boot. 

Northerly facing slopes mostly look hammered by the weather and uninviting, especially at upper elevations.