Quick report
On Friday Nov 29. We headed up to the. Bowl to ski after the recent storm. Being the first outing of the season, we had a few gear malfunctions (including broken ski) and didn’t end up getting into the bowl until ~2pm. From the bottom we decided to make our way up left gully, take a look around and make a choice to ski depending on what we observed locally. There was a small avalanche triggered earlier in the morning by a snowboarder in chicken rock gully (I believe) Thoughts on the snowpack in Left: No signs of instability when we were booting/skinning up the gully. Wind drifts/deposits in isolated areas, mainly on climbers left. These windrifts where super soft and pretty homogeneous right to the ground. We never observed the deep rain crust layer. In most of the gully the snow had a 1-2” windcrust on top of the ~3’ of storm snow. Again no signs of instability, and on the bootpack we were up to our waists in it. The 1-2” wind crust was well bonded to the storm snow. We think that if anything was to slide it would have been on that interface. (Not sure about the potential to step down to the ground though) In the end we decided we were happy in the stability of the snow and decided to ski it. Skiing was marginal and firm. With the 87mm waist skis I was on, I stayed on-top of the wind crust. But had a great run down!