Cold but worth it

Cold day for an AST course in Calzon but we persevered and the sunshine rewarded us. Daytime highs below treeline didn’t get above -17 but the sun made it feel a lot warmer. Still a lot of good older pow from last weeks storms out there on a well set up base. We mostly rode a few cutblocks with South facing aspects and didn’t see any signs of wind slabs or other instability, but we did see surface Hoar growing everywhere. Down low it was quite small, 2-3 mm range but up around 1300m we found some in the 5-10 mm range (see pic). The same layers are in the same place as last week, with compression test results in the hard range down 25 and 35, and a hard ice crust down 50 that didn’t react at all. Height of snow in our pit was 120 cm (CT21 dn 25, RP. CT28 dn 35, SP, ECTX all layers) All we need now is warm weather and some snow, but that Surface Hoar might make things tricky!