A day inside a ping pong ball

We managed to find our way to the summit of Mt McCreight today in white-out conditions. It was raining heavily at the base, which switched to snow around 700m. It was evident that the storm came in warm and created a rain crust, then cooled off to snow. This crust was about 1cm thick and supportive to skiers but not snowmobiles below 1200m. Above that, the rain crust still existed, but was much thinner. We saw as thin as about 2mm at 1450m which was quite breakable. The wind was howling at ridge top scouring the snow down to this crust and creating wind slabs. We had cracking on our up track and noticed the storm snow was sluffing on this rain crust. We saw about 7cm of snow fall over the course of our day. Around 1300m on the way down the snow became quite heavy and began to pinwheel.