Tenderfoot

We toured up Tenderfoot with a few questions to answer including, how is the wind affecting the snow, how deep is the surface hoar buried, and how are the weak layers near the ground looking in this area of Summit Lake. It looked like it had rained a little bit up to about 2,000', above that there was progressively more new snow up to 4" above old snow at our high point of 2,900'. We dug a snow pit at 2,500' on a northwest facing slope and found the snowpack to be almost 6' deep (176 cm). The snow near the ground was looking much stronger than we anticipated so we didn't do any stability tests targeting those layers. The weakest layer was about 4' below the surface and was a 5cm layer of 1F rounding facets above a crust that were 1-2mm in size and bonding. There was surface hoar buried 4" deep under the new snow. We did a shovel tilt test with no results (no real slab on top of the surface hoar in this location). We headed up a little higher to search for some wind slabs when someone told us a person had just triggered an avalanche on the north side of the ridge. See the avalanche attached to this observation for those details. With more snow and wind in the forecast that surface hoar layer will be getting stressed. The surface hoar was spotty in it's distribution so where that doesn't exist wind slabs will be the concern. There was a crust of some type (wind, sun, rain, warm) on all aspects so riding conditions were less than ideal, but not impossible.