Weather
The morning started so promising with no wind and warm temps. Fast forward 3 hours, and my skin was whipped out of my hand while trying to transition at 13,000 feet on Argentine Peak.
Snowpack
In the area I traveled, there were two main snowpacks. Dirt or a relatively deep and strong snowpack. The snow depth would quickly deepen after being very shallow, and in most places, I probed, which was over around a mile of slopes, close to 2 meters deep. On a northerly aspect near the treeline and a northeast aspect above the treeline, I felt or found a basal weak layer, but with a lot of pencil-hard snow above, these layers were hard to affect. The northeast aspect I dug on I targeted because it was shallower around 1 meter, and in this location, the basal facets were 1 finger hard with a layer of 4 finger hard above them. There was no reactivity in Extended Column Tests. I found a similarly deep and firm wind-blasted snowpack on a southeast aspect. In this location, I was able to get reactivity on a layer of facets below a pencil-hard wind crust. This was most likely the March 3 layer. There is a firm melt-freeze crust beneath this layer that is almost impenetrable, and water did not look like it had got below that layer.