🌬🌬🌬 Where did all the powder go?

Recent moderate to strong southwesterly winds have blown the powder into stiff slabs in the alpine and treeline making for some firm riding conditions. We saw no signs of recent avalanches in the area. There was a dusting of new snow from overnight, and the weather today was pretty calm, cloudy and cold at -11C. We dug a test pit on an east aspect at treeline around 1900m and found layers of surface hoar down 25 and 40cm. These layers were not very reactive in our tests but still made us leery of steep north and east facing slopes at tree line and below.