Observation: Cottonwood Canyon

First day venturing out from beginner bowl. Measured ~40cm of snow at the bottom of cottonwood near the top of the drainage. The descent into got pretty rocky / thin the bottom third and required skiing with care. Up higher things were supportable, fast, and generally pretty good skiing. By late afternoon the sun had taken it's toll on the sun exposed aspects. Had several notable collapses in flat meadows up high, nothing else like that the rest of the day.

I dug a quick pit at 8400 ft on an ENE facing slope in cottonwood. Kind of blown away by how different things looked than just the other day. One thing that stuck out to me was that the bottom 15cm of snow below the MF crust was notably more moist than I had noted in other pits, and I could form it into a snow ball, which I had not been able to do as recently as mid week.

Pit Results:

ECTN 8 at 20cm

Less scientific column tests also broke at a similar interface between the thick layer of storm snow that was characterized by containing more graupel and what I think was more recent storm snow that appeared to be more stellar in nature. I had a bit of a hard time making sense of the subtle differences between the storm snow layers.