Happy Chutes

The warmup narrowed the distribution of terrain where you can trigger facet sluffs by forming a thin crust on east and some northeast facing slopes. On very steep, northerly slopes that stayed dry through the last few days, it was still easy to trigger relatively small but gouging sluffs. 

I traveled on these slopes after 2:30 pm, once they had gone into the shade. On open slopes, a thin, very soft crust formed as far north as 45° to 50° (Around due NE), and under the canopy of pine trees, the snow surface was still moist and gloppy. The crust was preventing sluffs from initiating, based on ski cuts in steep terrain. Anything north of that was still sluffy cohesionless facets at the snow surface.