Reactive Surface Hoar in Beehive

We toured into Beehive Basin for field day 3 of our Pro Avalanche 1 course. We chose to avoid all avalanche terrain today on our ascent and paralleled the private boundary to reach the ridge on the East of Beehive Basin. Each member of our group then completed a full pit profile just below the ridge on W aspects. My pit was dug on a W aspect at 9,012 ft on a 20-degree slope. No active wind loading was observed at the location of my pit. I found snow instabilities approximately 30 cm below the snow surface on a layer of very large-grained surface hoar (CT8 Q2, ECTP2, PST 75/100 End). There were two additional layers of surface hoar buried deeper in the snowpack, although these layers were not reactive and showed signs of rounding and sintering. The basal facets in our pit are rounding and gaining strength and we did not find any instabilities deeper in the snowpack. We would expect to see natural avalanche activity on wind-loaded slopes that have this layer of buried surface hoar if we were to tour into this zone again tomorrow.