Hard slabs but beautiful sunshine

Sperry Glacier's weather station reported 70 mph gusts yesterday, so we went to what appeared to be the epicenter of the nuclear wind event, Lake McDonald, to see how wind slabs were behaving.  Today's forecast described them well.

• Above 5,500', the snow was heavily wind affected on all aspects.  We tested wind loaded drifts and produced some cracking, one collapse, and got easy to moderate propagating test results.  Where we traveled, slabs were up to 18" thick and hard (1F to P-).  Ugly.  The location of drifting was not aspect dependant: it appears winds were so powerful that there was a lot of eddying and re-channeling, with scouring and loading in a somewhat chaotic and unpredictable pattern.  
• An inch or two of fluffy new snow since the winds fizzled disguised wind slabs. I normally rely on visual cues and textures to shuck and jive around wind slabs, but today I had to probe and feel for them, blindly.  This, along with the erratic loading patterns, made for challenging slope specific assessments, so we dialed back our terrain choices. Heavily wind-scoured terrain was obvious though, thanks to huge ripples and old rollerballs exposed at the surface.  We skied lower slope angles and wind-scoured terrain at mid and upper elevations.  
• We saw two natural wind slabs (D2 and D1.5) that likely ran during the tail of the wind event.  We also observed a D1.5 wind slab triggered this afternoon by solar warming.  These were on East to South aspects above treeline.  Photos attached.
• With only 1 to 2" of fluffy snow on top of wind hardened surfaces, sluffing wasn't an issue.  However the new snow did get moist and produce a few small rollerballs on southerly aspects today.
• Inverted temperatures, calm winds, and lots of sunshine.