Tuckerman Ravine

We skinned into Tuckerman Ravine from Hermit Lake on a soft but supportable and well traveled surface. Traveling off the trail, ski penatration was no more than 5-10cm. and no cracking or collapsing was observed. We traveled against a strong head wind entering the ravine that whipped up small amounts of surface snow. Having better visibility than yesterday, we were able to see that start zones in the center headwall were scoured and many other areas showed evidence of wind textured snow. 

We elected to skin higher into SE facing terrain up the run out of Lobster Claw, probling with our ski poles and preforming hand sheers on the way up. Snow surface was suportable but soft enough to make ski touring relatively easy. Climbing closer to the choke, we found more scoured and drifted areas. On a small unsported roll over we were able to get a few small chuncks of a wind crust to propigate and break away just under our skis.

Overall it seemed to be a bit of mixed bag conditions with some soft turns, some grabby turns in deeper drifts, some loud and icy turns on firm old snow surface. 

In probing multiple locations with our ski poles we found soft snow on the pencil hard, supportive layer below.  This 4-6 inches of snow had an upsidedown structure with the top surface slightly firmer. Most hand shears required moderate to hard force and not all were planar when they broke. Newer snow (from the last several days) seemed to be bonding well to the old, hard surface.