4068'

It's true what they say, you can't ski a forecast. 8-12'' of forecasted snow turned into 90mph winds, rain, and what feels like an overall net-loss. While we ended up picking up a few inches of accumulating snow towards the end of the storm, conditions are rugged. Windward aspects are scoured and scalloped while leeward and cross-loaded aspects gained stiff drifts and ribbons below ridgeline. Travel today was less challenging than I'd expected, but we kept to mostly lower-angled or sheltered terrain. Rain or wet snow crusts were evident throughout our tour including at upper elevations. Yesterday's lingering instabilities appeared to have continued to settle, and outside of a couple of smaller isolated collapses, we observed no signs of instability. I would expect some of the more steep or cross-loaded features to be where you'd be more likely to encounter some lingering instability but on our travels today things felt pretty locked up. 

The snowpack took a big hit over the weekend. Extreme winds redistributed what snow we did have with a vengeance. Some aspects are completely stripped, including the SE aspect of Powder Pimple and the Mid-Rib of Marmot, which appears to be mostly snow-free with an old raised ascent track left over to serve as a warning. Other aspects accumulated dense ribbons and lenses of wind-drifted snow. Where the snow was redistributed, we found very stiff wind slabs sitting on the menagerie of crusts and facets that have formed throughout the season. Terrain below ridgeline and leeward to the prevailing SE winds did have a skiff of soft new snow to top things off. Our snowpit around 3500 ft on a N/NW facing slope was about a meter deep with a thin wind slab just under the skiff of new snow. While we were able to tease out some propagating test results below the recent slab and deeper in the snowpack, overall stability in the pit and throughout our tour seemed fair.