Letting sleeping dogs lie - chihuahuas and rottweilers.

We went to one of the windiest parts of the forecast area - and the place that got the most snow last night - to investigate the extent of new wind slabs

• On most leeway slopes, newly drifted snow was soft and shallow. We did find isolated wind slabs about a foot deep, but it was easy to avoid these larger round, dune-shaped drifts.
• We stomped on many small wind deposits. They were mostly unreactive where we traveled. We could only get a localized crack here and there. All drifts sat directly on top of the pre-game crust.
• The Super Bowl pre-game crust is thick and hard ice. We found it to at least 6500 feet. There's between 1/2 and 4 inches of low density snow on top that could facet and become our next persistent weak layer if the weather stays cold and clear until the next storm.
• We targeted the deep persistent weak layers in a snow profile dug on an upper elevation slope where the snowpack is shallow. Our pit taught us two things: the rounding depth hoar at the bottom of the snowpack still gives consistent propagating test results, and the 2/1 pre-game crust is so thick and hard that it's probably difficult to trigger the concerning layer.
• We avoided two specific types of terrain today. We stayed away from steep, wind loaded slopes where drifts looked bigger and the consequences looked higher. We also steered clear of slopes where had a higher chance of triggering the deep persistent layers - shallow snowpack, rocky, with mid-slope convexities. We found better skiing than expected on planar, well-supported slopes with deeper snow cover and no wind loading. The slopes we skied were about 35 degrees with a few inches of soft snow on top of the curst.