Blue Lakes

We took a ride out towards Blue lakes along the road and in adjacent areas today. The overcast cloud cover made for flat light and low visiblity conditions while riding. The snow coverage is still pretty thin within this area, as we periodically stopped I would probe and found anywhere from 70 to 130cm of snow. The surface snow was low density and good quaility riding one just need to stay focused looking ahead for signs of buried obstacles. As we moved around throughout the day the wind was blowing snow around in exposed and open areas but was nonexsitent in the trees and protected areas. We could also see banners of blowing of off Nipple peak/Polaris bowl ridgeline all  loading easterly facing slopes at a moderate rate throughout the day. With all the recent avalanches and thin snowpack we kept it pretty tame all day not really pushing exploring around to much and find ourselves in a unexpected bad spot to trigger something, There was a few old avy debris piles we observed but those were from a couple of days ago and have been blown in with snow; otherwise we saw no other signs of instabiltiy within this zone.

During our ride I stopped in a couple locations to dig and look at the buried PWLs within the snow pack. I dug two pits at nearly the same elevation but a few miles apart from eachother.  One at 8300' on a N aspect with HS of 130cm and one at 8100' on a NE aspect with HS of 90cm. There was a lot of similarity within the two; both had PWLs present about70-80cms down and showed results on my compression tests.  During my ECT test at 8300' I completed the test with no results, but I applied a few more hard hits after and finally got the layer at 80cms down to go, it went all the way across. I put my shovel behind it and it all pulled off in one mass, showing stubborn behavior.  Another thing that stood out in both pits was the snow at the interface at the ground, there was clustered melt forms that were wet and compressible, however just above that was a crust and there was weak faceted grains above the crust that were still dry and noncompressible only 10cms off the ground.