Obs From Tamarack & Houghton

My partner and I went for a tour around the Rose area today. From about 0830 to 0930 on our climb up Tamarack we observed NE winds transporting snow, past 930 the winds died down considerably in the area and we did not see snow transport the rest of the day. We did observe widespread cracking on the snow surface throughout our entire tour. A few hand pits on the climb to the top of tamarack did not reveal and surface hoar but did show a very cohesive wind buff layer about 4cm thick. We first observed this layer on the climb up Tamarack below treeline but continued to see this cohesive layer the rest of the day in NTL and ATL terrain. Ski conditions were not good with a combination of breakable sun crust and hard wind buff throughout our tour area. We were able to find pockets of uncohesive snow on northern shaded aspects, but these pockets were small and few and far between. We decided to dig a pit on a NE aspect south of Mt. Houghton in a fairly wind protected area to see if we could find any surface hoar. We did not find any surface hoar and our test results looked relatively stable. There was an odd failure point in all three of the tests we performed at 65cm. During our layer ID we found the layer 48-71cm to have a progressive hardness from 1F to 4F however, our shovel shear, CT, and ECT tests all had failures at 65cm which is in the middle of the previously stated layer. This failure did not propogate but did make us think a little bit.