Quick report
Tried to ski crooked couloir. I wasn't sure how phantom would be with the thin coverage and the overnight freeze. But it was honestly better than expected on the way up. I think that the area had gotten a few inches of snow, and had never seen the sun, so it was luckily not bulletproof ice in the phantom. And there were only a few places we had to bootpack. Up higher, near the entrance to slot, we started booting again. As other observations have stated, the gloppy south-facing fresh snow easily slid on the hard crust underneath, which made skinning difficult. The snow conditions in crooked were... disappointing. I had been hoping for 6+ inches of soft cool north-facing snow on top of the crust, but it was variable. I think the whole couloir had been wind-affected, so one turn would be on stiff wind-affected pillows, and the next would be on crust. No signs of windslab instability though. Unfortunately, we got shut down at the bottom of crooked. There was an impassable ice waterfall, with no way around it, due to the thin coverage. So we had to hike back up crooked. This delayed us, which made us have to descend phantom in the dark, which got a little spicy. So tldr; crooked is out until there's more snow :) There are some challenging travel conditions out there right now.