Another inch of new at Echo

Just an inch of new snow at Echo today. About 4 inches of snow accumulated over the past week was observed on sheltered slopes above the Jan 4th crust. On shaded, wind loaded slopes, a thin layer of facets was observed right on top of the crust. On both S and N sides of the ridge to Becker, facets were observed under the crust. These facets were weaker on the N side. Not enough continuous new snow or wind loaded snow was observed to be a concern today.

Pic 1: Becker/Talking Cirque is full of rocks and the old snow surface is not planar. Ankle high wind drifted snow was observed in concavities between the rocks. The convexities had the Jan 4th crust at the surface.

Pic 2: Wind drifted snow cracked above the Jan 4th crust, but did not extend far enough in any place observed today to be a concern.

Pic 3: On a planar slope, I artificially loaded two PST columns with an additional 10cm of snow and waited for it to consolidate. 10cm of naturally accumulated snow was already on top of the Jan 4th crust here, so the slab I ended up testing totaled 20cm. These non-standard PSTs (because they were artificially loaded) produced an Arrest and a Slab Fracture result, both at 30cm upslope. The facets here were quite weak - I had a hard time isolating the column without them simply falling out - so maybe with a thicker artificial slab results would have indicated propagation? That's just a guess based on how weak the facets were.