Quick report
A dusting of new snow with a little bit of wind had smoothed over a 2 inch very breakable crust that seems to had developed in the sunnier areas. Previous day's skin tracks were easy to find but filled in partially in areas. Winds were light but had been fairly strong in days prior. Snow in the trees was incredible, and out of the trees was warming quickly but still skied great. Showed some instabilities, but only a couple inches worth on the top, that with the warming, was pretty sludgy.
Avalanche
We had skinned up to the proboscis, taking note of some pretty variable snow on the way. It had warmed earlier than we had anticipated. Other than a large cornice collapse in the orchard bowl, we hadn't seen any other signs of recent avalanche activity other than a few very small slabs that looked to have gone naturally and didn't move far. One of those was at the top of the proboscis where we could faintly make out a small 2 inch crown about 20 ft wide that had released and stopped quickly. First skier gave a hard ski cut to skier's left into that release path. Anything that moved rolled like mud much to our surprise, and a couple roller balls found their way out below him. It seemed that anything that was going to move wasn't going to do much. I made the decision to make some fast turns down the face of it and released what we thought behaved like a slough wet loose. My second turn kicked some sluggish slough out behind me and I finished my line down to our meet point. Upon looking back up, that slough had turned into a very slow moving avalanche and was just getting into the trees as I got eyes on it. The remaining skiers skied the path then cut right before grabbing some good turns down to our meet point. 30 minutes later from our transition point, we heard a decently loud boom as a large cornice broke above the orchard bowl. We had already made the decision that we weren't gonna go in there, as is usually the call. We made our way to a good vantage point and the debris and cloud were still settling, a very large part of the cornice to looker's right had dropped.