Avalanche watching

Broken skies and good visibility gave us a chance to sled over to the Big Y on the East side of White Pass. Great powder riding in this zone, but even with that bottomless feeling there are still rocks at the bottom. Coverage is improving. We explored on skis up to 1700 m elevation and found snow depth of 185 cm. In our profile on a SW aspect we had moderate to easy results on new snow down 20 cm and notable sudden planar compression test results down 40 cm on a layer of facets that formed during the dry spell in December. The rest of the mid-pack was generally pencil hard and the bottom half of the snowpack is composed of loose facets. We observed a natural avalanche cycle today when the south winds picked up at ridgetop as we watched several size 1 avalanches run out of steep rocky terrain, these were narrow slides that ran 500 m long.