President's Ridge

I saw some nice tracks on Upper President's Ridge yesterday and thought I might have a closer look. On the ascent, I poked into the NE facing side of the ridge to dig in the snowpack. After, I continued to the top of Rae Wallace and admired the view before transitioning.  Human and animal tracks were apparent as folks continued to get more adventurous. There were a fair number of recent tracks on Microdot and the previously noted Pres Ridge, all without incident. Forecast problems continue to verify and it's great to see folks making the best of the situation and find good turns. 

Dug at 4300 ft on a somewhat previously loaded NE-facing roll just off President's Ridge. Height of Snow was just under a meter in this location with a snowpack pretty easily split into two parts. The upper pack consisted of a thin old wind slab, some fist hard decomposing and faceted grains interspersed with a couple of brittle crusts, and was topped with some recent surface hoar. Below about 65 cm was mostly facets in some stage of development. I was able to get propagating results (see video) about 35cm down on one test but these were not repeatable and generally lacked energy. Throughout the pit wall the slab in this location was firm but overall kind of thin (10cm) and breakable, if I had dug another 5m out onto the slope it probably would have disappeared completely.