Quick report
Skinned up to the base of Hillmans around 10:30 where the wind was starting to pick up causing some snow transport. A hand shear at the bottom of the line did not fail on the ice crust. I proceeded up Hillmans for a bit to just below the top of the Christmas tree, performing another hand shear to find again no failure at the ice crust, but the top 5 cm seemed to slide independently. I performed another hand shear targeting this upper level, and found the upper slab to pop loose rather easily. I skied down from this point: the skiing was quite nice. Met my partner at the base of the line behind some trees (at the top of the renewed runout zone off to the side) where he had dug a pit. We found a 13 cm layer of 1F+ snow on top of 4F, all on top of the ice crust 49 cm down. This strong over weak structure at 13 cm was clearly the one that I found in my upper hand shear, and likely missed on my first hand shear by only looking at the K hard interface. A compression test yielded CTM 13 cm down (Q2? Photo attached), and an extended column test gave ETCN22, also 13 cm down.
Weather
Winds increasing along with snow transport