Elephant's Hump

We toured out on Elephants hump today. Throughout the day, weather was pretty calm with some cloud cover, slightly above freezing temperatures, and almost zero wind. Within this area roughly 10cm of near surface facets are starting to grow with 3 to 5 mm surface hoar on top. This combo was present on all North facing aspects that were protected from recent wind events. We dug a pit at 8300 feet on a true North  aspect. Within our compression test a sudden collapse was observed on the January 31 faceted layer approximately 80 cm down. The facets in this layer were definitely dry and noncompressible. Moving to the extended column test I went all the way through 30 taps and on an additional load of 31 we had clear propagation across on the same layer. Also, in the top 40 cm of the snowpack we had planar results in our shovel tilt. Moving onto the extended column tests, we had clear propagation on this layer that was 35 cm down that  looked like a layer of buried surface hoar. Repeating this a second time we did not get clear propagation on this layer but ECTN results. We observed one large avalanche across the way from red lake Proper above the highway going towards Carson pass. It was on a northeast aspect around 8500 feet with clear propagation across the slope, indicating failure on a  persistent weak layer. Besides that  our group observed no other signs of avalanches in our area. The ride out was enjoyable, and we kept it in low angle, terrain to avoid the persistent weak  layer.