1” of snow, a foot of blow

Day off tour in the Flathead Range 15 miles north of the US border outside of our forecast area.

• Strong to extreme winds and a couple inches of new snow formed touchy wind slabs. Slabs were 2”-4” thick at mid elevations and up to 10” thick near upper elevation ridgelines. We skier triggered a handful of wind slabs and noticed about 5 naturals. All were D1 to D1.5 in size. 
• Periods of intense blowing snow and shooting cracks made the problem easy to identify. We easily avoided it by skiing in wind sheltered trees and staying away from wind loaded slopes with high consequences. 
• We saw one natural avalanche from the New Year storm that was several feet thick on a steep, rocky, south facing slope. It likely failed on the Christmas Eve crust.  Didn’t see any other obvious signs of instability involving that layer.