Blowing down

Wildly windy at ridge top was the story today. Luckily the wind seemed to mostly be affecting the top 100 or 200 m closest to the ridge and once we were below that elevation, conditions were pretty quiet and ski quality was quite good. The wind was likely forming some new slabs on the leeward side of the ridges; as we travelled we could kick off small pockets of 5-10 cm thick. The positive is that where the wind was blowing, it would have destroyed the surface hoar that was recently formed to ridge top. As for the deep persistent problem, we dug at around 1800 m and found the surface hoar layer and the facet/crust layer down around 100 to 120 cm deep with a total snowpack depth of 180 cm. The weak layers of surface hoar and faceted grains were rounding and did not produce any concerning result in snowpack tests. We also found a small rounding layer of surface hoar down about 40 cm, but it also didn't produce an alarming result during the compression test.