Surface Hoar Buried 20cm (8-10") deep at Goose Lake

We rode through to the Goose Lake wilderness area boundary and skied from there to look at the snowpack in higher elevation, alpine terrain. Like the day before, we managed our exposure to avalanche terrain be keeping ourselves off and out from under large slide paths because of our concern for the possibility of deep slab avalanches. 

We dug two snowpits on the tour and found a layer of surface hoar buried 20 CM deep (on the far end of Goose Lake at ~10,000' elevation on an east and northeast-facing slope). It did not propagate in any of the tests we performed, but it is certainly something to watch for. We did not see it in our snowpits yesterday, it will take more time and more snowpits to pin down the extent of this new weak layer and whether it will become a widespread problem. 

Our two primary concerns for today were wind slabs, we observed several recent wind-slab avalanches on Mount Fox and Henderson Mountain, and deep-slabs like the one that caught a pair of riders on Thursday on the SW side of Henderson.