Quick report
We toured around Virginia Lakes today to enjoy some winter conditons and get a look at the new snow coverage and the existing PWL. We found new snow depth of about 20-50cm, ranging from F-4F, and while the storm snow was not bonding well with the old surface crust, we didn't see any signs of new slab formation. We did see some natural sluffing on steeper slopes, but that was minimal. We dug a test pit on an ESE slope at about 10,500 ft to see if we could get a reaction out of the PWL, choosing a relatively shallow area in the snowpack where the dense 1F cohesive layer above it was only 15cm thick, and this was sitting on top of an easy to find facet/crust/facet layer about 20cm up from the ground. CT showed some instability at the new snow / old snow interface but did not get a result at the PWL; When we pushed a shovel behind the column to force it, though, we did still get a clean planar break of the whole column at the PWL, but it was very stubborn. This largely matched our expectations, seeing that the PWL was still clearly present but getting harder to release.