Quick report
We travelled through mostly treed, wind-sheltered terrain up to 9000'. As we started our tour, we encountered a melt freeze crust that began to disappear around 7800'. We did not observe any recent avalanches or signs of instability. The weather was mostly cloudy with some pockets of sunshine and light to no wind. We dug a pit at 9000' on a west facing slope that was sheltered from the wind with a HS of 95-100cm. We observed many different hardness changes in the snowpack including a crust around 27cm that appeared to create the weakest interface in our snow pit tests (CT27 and ECT22 both at 27cm). The snowpack failed at the interface between the crust and the facets below it. Though we didn't observe signs of instability today, the consequences of affecting this layer feel too great to risk stepping out into consequential terrain right now.