Round Top

We toured out of the Carson Pass south SnoPark towards Round Top and then later checked out the Elephant's Back bowl and the terrain above Red Lake on our way back to the vehicles. We generally found widespread evidence of wind affected fresh snow. Some wind exposed areas were scoured down to the old melt crust, gullies had firm but edgable wind board, and there were areas of impressive sastrugi. Jumping on test slopes and above of existing skin tracks yielded minimal if any cracking. We saw some subtle evidence of previous avalanche activity that appeared to occur during the storm.  The softest snow we found was in below tree line north east facing terrain around 8400'.  Around 1pm it seemed that temperatures increased and melting was occurring off trees and we experienced glopping on our skins as we headed back to the cars.