Mammoth Lakes Basin - small wind deposits and well defined depth hoar

Ventured into the lakes basin to get a read on recent snow amounts and to see how things are looking with our basal facets.

• I was a bit surprised to find about 35 cm of new fist hard snow from our recent smaller storms (Mon-Thurs). Needless to say, the ski quality was pretty pleasant.
• Surface snow has seen some faceting over the past couple of nights of very cold temperatures, and we found some areas of surface heat, many areas with near-surface facets, and substantial radiation recrystallization crusts in some areas.
• Leaving the car in the morning, we were immediately struck by stronger winds than we had expected, and some plumes of blowing snow were visible along ridgelines.
• Near and above the treeline, we saw ample evidence of recent wind transports, including textured snow surfaces, recent drifting, hollow drum-like and upsidedown snow, as well as some surface cracking and small reactive wind slabs on test slopes.
• Winds continued out of the southwest for most of the day and seemed to shift to the north in the afternoon.
• Settlement within the surface snow seems to be happening relatively quickly, as evidenced by settlement cone around several trees.

• Periodic probing highlighted snow depths from 150cm to 200 cm above 9000'. 
• We dug in on a NE aspect at 10400' in a location with 195 cm of snow and basal facets on the ground. 
• The snowpack is much more robust than the last time I dug here before our last storm cycle, and we found that the bulk of this recent snow has settled relatively quickly.
• Our snow pit highlighted the basal facets as our layer of concern. However, it is worth noting that while these grains are still striated and large (2-4 mm), they are showing signs of rounding.
• It was a little surprising to see failure on our compression test at this depth, but we did see sudden collapse results on the basal facets with 2 hit from the shoulder. (CT22 SC) Unsurprisingly, we did not see failure or propagation in our ECT test. We conducted an informal test, pulling the saw along the weak layer at the base of our ECT column, and this resulted in propagation after about 20 cm of cut length. Take that for whatever it is worth.
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