We Are The Captains of Crunch

We crunched our way up high in the northern Whitefish Range on southwest, west, and northwest aspects.

• We found crust. In areas sheltered from the sun we found a half inch thick, breakable freezing rain crust. This crust was most pronounced below about 7000 feet, but we found an eggshell crust as we poked out onto the top of a north-facing ridgeline at 7400 feet. 
• We found more crust. On southwest and west facing slopes, really anywhere exposed to direct sun, we found a 2 to 3 inch thick, supportable, melt-freeze crust all the way to our high point.
• We found 2-4 inches of newer snow atop all the crusts. It stayed cold and dry in the trees and on northerly slopes and was transitioning to moist on sunny aspects where we got some golf ball sized rollers from our skin track. 
• We dug a snow pit on a northwest slope at 7300 feet and found 2 weak layers above the mid-January interface. We found broken and rounding surface hoar less than 3 feet below the surface and got propagating test results in that layer. We tested a layer of facets buried over 3 feet with deep tap tests and got sudden planar results with hard force. There's a very hard slab atop those weak layers. There was a crust on the surface at our pit site, just like everywhere else.

We did ride slopes steeper than 35 degrees at upper elevations. We chose concave terrain - a slope that gradually became less steep as we descended. It had a deep, uniform snow cover - it doesn't get scoured or cross-loaded by wind, and there were no rocky outcrops. The snow was surprisingly good, though the crust underneath crunched like a frosted flake under our boards.