Feathers under crust

Riding conditions were much easier than last week, but it was more tracked out. Good to see people getting out:) The rain crust is now under about 40 cm of soft snow, so riding was great wherever you could find a patch without a track in it. We stayed in mellow terrain today, as we were mostly spending our time digging for information about the early December surface hoar layer. See snowpack comments.

~40 cm of soft recent snow over a relatively supportive, 5 cm rain crust. Settled, dry snow between that and the early December surface hoar layer, which was down around 80cm. The surface hoar was about 5mm in size, starting to round, and was not reactive in standard compression tests, but produced moderate to hard resistant planar failures in deep tap tests, and it seems that you'd be hard pressed to find a slope where it's a problem for a rider at this elevation in this zone. We suspect the story would be different if you got to higher elevations where there is no rain crust.