Shelter from the Storm, a good song.

Spent the day in the backcountry adjacent to the ski area to search for snow protected from the arctic assault.

• Skied several laps on East and Northest facing slopes between 5400-6600'.
• Wind affected snow can be found in open areas at these elevations. we mostly avoided these areas with wind affected snow, but on a few ocasions utilized small openings as test slopes to gather information. These slopes produced minor cracking in pockets, but didn't feel like something that would propagate yet, as much of the underlying snow is still unconsolidated in these semi protected slopes. Wind affected snow that I observed was 1-3" (4F+) on top of 10"+ (F).
• It was not difficult to find well protected areas harboring unconsolidated snow. However occasionally, we would still encounter pockets of wind affected snow within seemingly dense protected forest. The strong arctic winds were clearly trying their best to penetrate forested areas.
• Minimal cracking observed in this storm slab where it remained unconsolidated, however it was easy to initate sloughing on steep slopes. These failures appeared to be riding on/within the buried surface hoar layer.
• Temps were very cold (~5 degrees F), but winds were calm between 1100am-330pm. Not the case when we returned to the front side at the end of the day, greeted by light/moderate SW winds.