Dust on Variable Crust and Wet Snow on Mt. Judah

As we left the truck we found a dusting of new snow resting on top of a thin but mostly supportable crust. Underneath the crust, 1 to 2 ft of rain-soaked snow existed on all aspects to the summit of Mt. Judah. In areas where the sun shone on the snow, like the easterly and southerly aspects, the crust was very thin and was already melting away by 10 am. On the more northerly aspects, the crust was thicker and more supportable. Skinning up the ridges we tried to stay on areas where there was a dusting of new snow because the exposed crust was firm uneven and slippery. 

From the summit ridgeline, we saw several large cornice collapses that looked like they had failed during the rain last night. These large pieces of cornices had triggered large loose wet avalanches (see more details here) and at least one slab avalanche.

Even at this elevation, wet snow still existed under the more frozen and supportable surface crust. Around 11:30 snow squalls started moving through the area flanked by periods of intense spring sunshine. We looked for signs of lingering slab instabilities but did not find any from our ski cuts, general observations, or snowpit data but we still did not venture into steeper terrain due to obvious signs of potential loose wet instabilities and firm, variable, crusty travel conditions.

We descended low angle slopes piecing together smooth areas where dust on crust conditions existed. By the time we came back to the lower elevation E facing slope that we looked at earlier in the day, the crust was gone and shin deep wet snow existed on the slope. Ski cuts on a steep E-SE facing test slope nearby easily triggered loose wet sluffs (video - I misspoke and called it a S aspect in the video). On a larger slope with more runout, the easy-to-trigger loose wet avalanches could have been problematic.