Hatch Weather Station

We did not receive great feedback from the snow today, with few signs of instability like cracking or collapsing. Although a 360-degree view of recent avalanche activity was enough to keep us out of big terrain. We stopped along the ridge to look at a recent slide that skiers triggered remotely on Sunday. We found a stiff slab of snow overlaying buried weak layers below. This avalanche wasn't massive by any means, but it took out most of the snow covering the rocks on the slope. 
We kept our terrain choices simple and chose to ski terrain with a relatively clean runout and more uniform coverage. 

Surfaces: New snow has settled, becoming more supportable. Surfaces ranged from old, decomposing snow to stiffer wind skins. Near the craggy terrain on the ridge, the surface snow on south-facing terrain had begun to wet. 

Buried Weak Layers: 
We stopped along the ridge to investigate a skier-triggered slide that happened on Sunday. They likely remotely triggered the slide from a shallow spot along the ridge. The avalanche failed on basal weak layers. Weak snow wasn't continuous through the crown; at the deepest, we found 8' of wind-drifted snow above the October crusts. As the depth tapered outward, we were able to find buried weak layers. In our stability tests at the crown, we found ECTP26 results, HS 105—this slope had collapsed, so the results are likely not that representative. 

We dug down to these weak layers on the south side of the ridge, where the slope had previously collapsed, leaving a spiderweb of cracks behind. We found a similarly shallow snowpack with stiff drifted snow above. Near the weather station, we probed around on the north side and found close to 130-150+cm on the ground.