Hyndman

Off-duty day. Just moving through terrain and watching the world go by. Probing, hand pitting, a little shoveling, lots of eyeballing. 

We did not get to a wet problem in the terrain I traveled in today, though the road was quite wet and muddy on my drive out in the moonlight. 

I experienced a few relatively small, odd-sounding collapses involving dense slabs in the alpine. I did not observe associated cracking.

At 7,000', average HS is around 70cm, 2/1 weak layer about halfway down the stack.

In a pit at 8600' on an ENE aspect:
2/1 down 50cm, presenting as an aerated MFcr (I did not find a water-ice lens here, though there seemed to be a bit of pooled and then frozen water at the bottom of this 3-4cm thick crust. The bond here was strong.
1/6 down 70cm, presenting as 4F to 4F- FC/DH. This layer had some meltwater pushed through it during rain and warm temps at the end of January, but that doesn't seem to have done a lot to improve things. Slab overlying this 1F+ to P-. Produced ECTP 25 x 2, ECTP 28. 

Surfaces are a real mixed bag, lots of crusts and facets out there on solars and margins, lots of FCsf and some SH on shadies. A more intense cooking the next few days may help mute some of these weak surfaces, but I expect we'll have a "good" crust+fc combo in many locations after this warm up. 

The observed very large avalanche on the S face of Hyndman is a good reinforcement that our weak layers exist on solars as well as shadies. There has been more activity on the shaded side of the compass, but alpine solars are not to be trusted in my book.