portal creek

We skied from marmot pass down to portal creek. Snow pack was very thin on the north side of the pass with evidence of a size 1 slide from a few days (maybe a week?) before that ripped to ground. Snow on open slopes of the south side of the pass was quite wind effected, some areas having a supportive crust with about 5cm of new snow. During our transition in an open area, we had some whumpfing and decided against another lap in the trees. We observed a 10cm layer of new wind affect snow on a 5cm crust that tended to move on a very large layer of facets, this was consistent with what we found at the top of our skin track at treeline. We all agreed that travel on any larger open and unsupported slopes would be unwise.