Powder and collapses and bears oh my!

Toured Grizzly Shoulder and Teddy Bear trees today and found ~50cm of new snow overlying the well developed facet layer above the Feb 3rd crust. While breaking trail above 1600m we felt/heard a handful of large collapses and saw localized shooting cracks (<5m) which oriented us to keep to supported slopes and smaller disconnected terrain features. We also observed a couple of recent avalanche crowns (size 2 estimated) at ~1800m on Cheops’ north aspect in small pieces of open terrain. These looked to have failed on the facet/crust layer. Beauty of a day out there with a handful of glorious sucker holes and calm winds!

At 3pm we heard a large avalanche running from high on the north aspect of Cheops but couldn’t see it due to clouds rolling in. Unsure of specifics due to limited (no) visibility.