Apex Proper

Headed up to Apex Proper to poke around the bowl. There was about 5-10cm of fresh snow which felt pretty heavy and was sitting on top of the facets that formed during the cold dry spell. There was a brief sunny period around 09:45 which got things pretty warm but fortunately some clouds rolled in and kept the temperature from rising too much. The snow in the bowl was a bit funky as a result of significant wind affect and the vastly different snow densities, so the riding was pretty mediocre. We did observe some signs of warming including some tree bombs and some roller balls/small wet loose but no other signs of instability. We also had a quick peek into the main chute and it's still a mandatory rappel in (unless you're very brave or foolish)

We observed debris from a few small wet loose slides that appeared to be a day or two old. None were particularly large and all seemed to be the result of solar warming on trees and exposed rocks. However, it was a bit surprising to see these signs of warming on polar slope that we assumed would've stayed cold

The car thermometer showed -1C in the upper gunbarrel parking lot at 9am and still showed -2C when we got back around 3pm indicating temperatures were relatively stable throughout the day. Other than a half hour of sunshine and blue skies around 09:45 it was mostly overcast with some valley clouds as well. Winds were calm in the morning but picked up in the afternoon with some strong ridgetop gusts on our walk out. No blowing snow was observed, but I think if the snow wasn't so heavy there would've been some.

We dug a quick profile at the ridgeline above the bowl and after probing in a few spots we found an average snow depth of about 90cm (some spots were shallower but we didn't find any deeper than 1m). The top 10ish cm was heavy storm snow while everything below that was facets. Our compression tests showed the storm snow crumbling a bit and had a resistant planar break in the facets about 65cm down under a very heavy load. A quick hand shear midline indicated a shallow slab that popped off the facets fairly easily.