Breakable crust at Rubicon

After reading about the high elevation overnight snow and rain event our group decided to try to get up to higher terrain to find softer snow surfaces. We chose Rubicon Peak knowing that we could quickly get above 7600' and then into the elevation that recieved more new snow last night. 

On the inital portion of the skin up to the snowtel station at 7600' we observed a mix of rain softened snow surface that gave way to a 3 cm thick crust made up of clear ice pellets that resembled graupel (Photo1). The crust continued like this up to around 8000' where it started to be mostly made up of graupel pellets frozen together. When we reached around 8600' the crust was gone and there was about 3" of mostly graupel snow on the surface (Photo 2). 

A quick snowpit at 8000' N aspect, open treed area showed the 1/4 crust and facet layer down about 24 ". The facets at this location were 4F hard but still sandy in the hand and resisted clumping together. Extended Column Test suggested unlikely propagaion at this location: ECTN 22 on 1/4 Facet layer. We did not experience any whumpfs or any cracking that extened down to this layer while we were in the area today.

Along the summit ridgeline the winds were Light out of the West, with occasional Moderate gusts blowing graupel around creating small wind slabs. Kicking at the most obviously loaded areas led to some surace cracking, but nothing that extended beyond ski size or was deeper than a few inches (Photo 3).

The inital skiing from 9000'-8600' was very pleasant carvable graupel snow, but this quickly gave way to breakable crust conditions. The breakable crust made for challenging skiing all the way down until we got below 7400' or so where it became more rain wetted snow that skiied more consistently.