Left Gully

With South and Southwest winds overnight we opted to look for wind slab formation in Northeast-facing terrain. We chose Left Gully over Hillman's to avoid overhead hazard in our travel plan.  On route from Pinkham to the bottom of Left Gully we found drier, less dense snow as we increased in elevation. On the Tuckerman Ravine Trail we found 2-3 inches of snow evenly distributed and blanketing the surface. Winds increased and lower density snow in the bowl was being transported. As we skinned higher in the bowl, we found more wind distriubted snow with some areas scoured down to the shinny melt-freeze crust and some drifts of snow as deep as the top of our boots. Around noon in the lower third of Left Gully we each triggered several propigating cracks and very small pockes of wind slabs while traveling on skis. The cracks propigated up to 15feet and the small slabs triggered were no more than 2 inchs thick at most. We suspect larger windslabs were and still are forming higer in elebation and in start zones into this afternoon. New snow on the Sherbourne ski trail was wet and heavy to push around. 

While we did not conduct any formal snowpack tests, the information we gathered traveling though the terrain led us to believe that hard over soft structured wind slabs are forming in NE- facing terrain and could easily be triggered within the layer of softer snow in the slab.