Elephant's Hump

I toured around Elephant's  Hump today looking at the old snow. Old tracks were firm but undisturbed snow remained soft. A few sheltered spots held impressively large surface hoar. On a flat location with a breakable melt freeze crust we dug below the crust and found soft near surface facets. We dug a pit in a below treeline open area just below 8000' on a NE (25°) aspect slope. Snow height was 54 cms and it was unsurprisingly mostly facets. The weakest layer was just below the surface where we found 15 cms of fist hard near surface facets. We also found 5 cms of fist hard facets at the ground but the ground was rough and these we didn't get any tests larger than a CT to fail on this layer. After finishing up this pit we checked out a more open and more East facing but still NE (65°) aspect at a similar elevation. This location had signficantly less snow and was also quite weak with the weakest snow again being the near surface facets below thin breakable crust.