Blowing Snow, Upside Down Layering, and Whumpfing in Johnson Canyon

We choose to tour Johnson Canyon today in order to be able to avoid travel in avalanche terrain while at the same time being able to look into avalanche terrain. Rain on snow had occurred in this area yesterday evening up to about 6,700' to 6,900'. Above that elevation, we were above near surface rain crust and traveling on dense, supportable storm snow.  We triggered two isolated collapses with whumpfing sounds on the edge of wind loaded E aspect terrain with a shallow snowpack at around 6,800'. The collapse occurred on the dense surface snow/rain crust that was 1F hard on top of F hard storm snow. Cracks went down only about 6 inches through the surface slab to the lower density snow below. Once above 6,900' we experienced no furter collapses.

Ascending higher on the ridge we saw where a natural cornice collapse had triggered a wind slab avalanche at the noted lat/long. This was on a wind loaded ENE aspect avalanche path at treeline at about 7,250'.

We dug a test pit on an E aspect at about 6,800'. HS was 205cm We found no buried surface hoar. We had an ECTP-27 at 145cm on graupel and stellers within the storm snow. The top of the old crust/facet layer was at 100 cm in our pit.