Crescent Couloir on Round Top

Toured up to Round Top Peak hoping that the new storm snow and wind blown snow had stabilized since Thursday/Friday with the above freezing temps during the day and freezing temps at night. The goal was to ski Crescent Couloir. Snow felt really good and and stable on the approach. At 0900 and ~8.5k, the sun exposed NE faces that are >30 degrees showed wet/loose activity from past days but the refrozen crust was still firm and supportable. Once we got into the bowl immediately below the N face of Round top peak (~9.5k) the snow was still soft and consistent with no obvois wind loading despite recieving sun when skinning up. Onces we made the subtle shift to a NNW aspect to change over in the shade we started noticing shooting cracks in the recently deposited wind blown snow.  We decided to dig a pit (didn't think to grab pictures). 8" below the surface was a sliding layer that slid on the first elbow tap, with no more weak layers noticed down the 3.5' that we dug. We decided to do an ECT on a NNE facing slope becasue thats the main aspect of the couloir and dug to the same depth with an ECTX result. As we moved up the couloir no windslab was present.  At the top, 10.3k, we entered the hanging NNW facing snowfield that had been on the sun all day while we were on the approach.  We had to move around a boulder that was exposed by wind and as soon as I started to place my foot on the sunny NNW face an 8-10" thick, dinner table sized wind slab cracked and slid from where I placed my foot, it did not propogate further.

We stayed off that hanging snow field by staying real close to the boulder I mentioned previously and skied the couloir without incident. There was plentiful and fast slough but it was easily managed.