Good turns and a few small avalanches

We went to the northern Whitefish Range to confirm today's avalanche hazard. We traveled on slopes adjacent to where natural avalanches were reported on the 12th to see if there were any persistent weak layers or if those slides were likely the result of loading during that storm.

• We were looking for the avalanche problems and we found them. We intentionally triggered 3 soft slab avalanches on very steep, northwest facing slopes around 7000 feet. These were only about 6 inches deep and about 30 feet wide. They ran about 200 feet. The surface snow was only stiff enough to fracture as a slab on the downwind sidewalls of crossloaded gullies. Winds were lite today, but must have been just enough to drift snow during yesterday's storm.
• We triggered a few baby sluffs in similar terrain. These did not run far and consisted only of the top 2 inches of  new snow.
• We dug snow pits on northwest and southeast aspects around 7000 feet and found very similar layers on both aspects. Generally strong, right-side up layers that got harder closer to the ground. We did find a layer of rounding facets just above a hard crust. This layer was buried over a meter down, except where the wind had stripped the soft overlying snow. We did not get any propagating test results.
• We skied steep terrain with a few simple rules:

1. We went one at a time and had radios to check in.
2. We ski cut the top of our run to mitigate any hazard on the slope before proceeding.
3. We chose terrain the was not on the downwind side of a crossloaded ridge, was not so confined that we couldn't let moving snow pass us by, and did not have terrain traps below.