Quick report
Temperatures were a bit warmer today, 4f at the car and around 15f in the alpine. Winds were mostly light out of the nw but ramping up throughout the tour with gusts to around 15 on the ridge. There is loose snow available for transport, and we saw flagging off most peaks in the pass and along the arm on our drive home. The approaching front scuzzed out the sun after an impressive sunrise and left us with flat light most of the day. It is also a bit of a war zone of glide cracks and debris on sunburst and throughout turnagain pass. The glide crack party continues with lots of fresh cracks and releases.
Snowpack
We dug a pit just below taylor pass on a west aspect at 2850' with an hs of 140cm. The setup we found was a few cm of loose snow over 30cm of wind packed snow overlaying a 10cm layer of facets that had a few small surface hoar grains intermixed. Below this was more one finger/pencil hard snow with a 5cm knife hard ice crust down 70cm. This is the first crust like this I have seen in mid elevation snow pits this season and I can't explain it. We had an ectn24 down 40cm on the facets.