Weather
Cold temperatures, sunny skies and light winds in the morning gave way to broken skies and moderate to strong winds out of the southwest by noon.
Snowpack
We dug a pit at 11,500', near treeline. Here, winds had previously drifted snow into a 1-finger-hard slab over well developed facets and depth hoar. Interestingly, the 12/28 rain crust is still preserved here in the snowpack about 40cm down, but slowly losing strength from faceting. While we didn't receive results in a standardized ECT, a few extra blows from the shoulder produced a propagating result on a deeply buried weak layer formed in early December. Here, the snowpack layering changes from facets to larger-grained depth hoar. While these weak layers have been dormant for some time, the added weight of the incoming load could be enough to increase the reactivity of these older persistent weak layers.