Hankin Conditions Update

We got out for a quick morning ski at Hankin before hitting the road today. The Alpine looks pretty wind effected and not all that inviting for a ski. Cornices were observed at Ridgecrest but nothing out of the ordinary. We found surprisingly good ski quality with 20+ cm of settled storm snow. Above 1200 m we did not find a crust, below 1100 m the storm snow rests on top of the crust. We dug a test profile at 1350 m and found 200 cm of snow. We did not find a any persistent weak layers. There was a resistant planar shear on small rounding facets about 40 cm below the surface that were likely created during the February drought. The low angle terrain provided great ski quality despite yesterday’s warm up.