Quick report
-Monday and monday night's precip involved a lot of graupel! It didn't form any distinct layers that we noticed in hand pits, rather it seemed evenly mixed in with the storm snow. - We were in the field from 7 -10:30 am. In that time we experienced calm conditions, broken sky and some sunshine, and also some obscured conditions from lower clouds moving in and out of the alpental valley. A very springy feeling morning.
Avalanche
-Observed multiple recent D1 storm slabs, crowns 4-6in deep, primarily on exposed S - NE facing convexities/ unsupported slopes, mostly propagating 10-15ft across. A member of our party triggered a D1 storm slab of this variety on a small E facing slope around 4100'. Our hypothesis was that these slabs were failing on a subtle sun crust from Monday morning underneath last night's storm snow. -One outlier in terms of size was a crown observed at a distance in the terrain surrounding the thumbtack, which seemed to have propagated widely and was possibly closer to D2 in size (also possible it was multiple smaller adjacent avalanches, difficult to tell from a distance). -We also observed a recent D1 wind slab, 10ft wide, crown 6-12in deep in a rocky, confined chute around 5000'. We observed wind loaded slopes, especially near rocky terrain, but wind loaded test slopes were stubborn to unreactive to ski cuts and hand shears.