Stiff wind slab and spooky wumpfs

Today we had a short ski day on the notch at Fraser. There has been up to 25 cm of snow over the weekend that has now been redistributed by strong southerly winds. We had a quick dig in the bottom of Big Kahuna on a north aspect and found a layer of decomposing surface hoar and facets down 30 cm from the snow surface. We were able to get moderate results during a compression test. There was about 15 cm of non-wind effected snow here and ski quality looked good. We then went to the Notch and dug on a North East aspect at 1450m. Dense wind slab had formed from the previous strong winds over the weekend. In testing, we found a layer of surface hoar and facets down 60 cm that was producing non-propagating results in extended column tests. We continued to tour up the ridge and looked into a few different couloir's and decided to ski back down our skin track on the ridge due to the poor-looking ski quality inside the couloir's and the presence of the surface hoar and facet layer we observed in the snow profiles we dug earlier. On our way down we skied over the entrance of the mellowest line on the face and had a large wumpf. This confirmed our decision to stick to mellow terrain and we skied back down our skin track.