Observation: Soapstone

Quick pit on an untracked north facing slope. The weakest snow was the interface just below the newest snow. I would expect that steeper slopes in the wind zone would be more sensitive at this interface on north-east facing slopes. The rain crust is starting to break down in this location and there were places where the tracks of the sled were breaking through the crust to the facets near the ground.

Photo of depth hoar (faceted snow) under the rain crust

Snow surface was 10"-12" new snow with the old surface still ever present under the newest snow. You could still feel the hard packed on southerly slopes and soft faceted loose on more north-east facing slopes. There were some zones where we observed cracking in the new snow isolated to steeper slopes where one track sidehilled above or below another track. 

With the broken skies and the warm sun we did note some greenhousing going on in the surface snow, but did not observe any wet snow activity.