During my fieldwork in the mountains I've been keeping an eye on two things. First, I've been poking around trying to find any recent drifts of snow that will crack out. I really haven't been able to find anything notable. I know that there are some out there that are sitting on "near surface facets" from January. However, as I travel around my thinking is there aren't all that many that will crack out on a person right now.

The second thing I've been keeping an eye on is the condition of the surface snow. In many locations there is about 6 inches of sugary "re-crystallized" near surface facets that have formed over the last three weeks. The concern is that this loose snow could act as a weak layer once it's buried by new snow. Some locations hold undisturbed very loose snow. Some locations have a wind crust over the top of the loose snow. Other locations are just a very hard windboard. The distribution of this weak snow on the surface is tricky to map out its distribution. This could produce a very tricky pattern of which slopes might avalanche and which ones won't. All we can do is continue to watch what the snow surface is like before the next storm and hopefully figure out some sort of pattern where things may be dangerous once it snows again.