40cm soft snow is fun!

We spent the day in Elkford in the Mear Lake area. We skied up to the alpine for the first time this week to get a sense of how the recent snow and winds were impacting the snowpack at upper elevations. The biggest surprise was the lack of wind during the day and no wind slab development. There was about 40 cm of soft snow that was not showing any obvious clues of instability like shooting cracks on our way up. We wanted to check on the deep persistent layer at the bottom of the snowpack and found that it is gaining strength. We avoided thin rocky areas as these basal layers may still be found in these isolated terrain features and skied a moderately steep slope down.