Wet Snow, Breakable Crust, Wind Effects on Slide Mountain

When we started our tour we had a plan to go up N aspects and look a the sun-exposed S aspects. If those S facing slopes were still supportable, then we would descend on those slopes. If they were too wet, we would come back down the N facing slopes. As soon as we left the car, we found a small knoll with a S facing side at around 8700 ft. This small S facing slope had not ripened into true corn conditions, but there was still about .5 inches of wet surface snow on top of a thin (2 inches thick) supportable melt-freeze crust. We knew this crust would probably melt today but were glad to see that it was supportable at the moment. 

We continued up the northerly slopes and did not find any signs of instability on these slopes but we also did not find consistent snow conditions. We did find a mix of conditions ranging from breakable crusts, wind affected snow surfaces to soft snow to wet snow. Once we got to the top we scouted for an escape route on low angle sun-exposed slopes in case, they had become unsupportable while we had skinned up. We started by descending an E facing slope that held wet soft snow on top of a still-supportable crust. We then traversed around to the SE and S aspects. The wet surface snow became softer and deeper but still only measured about 2 inches in depth on these aspects at ~9200 ft at 12:50 pm. We found a small, steep, S facing test slope and ski cuts on this slope only triggered very small loose wet sluffs involving the top 1-2 inches of wet snow. We continued to monitor conditions as we descended regrouping and checking to make sure the snowpack remained supportable. By the bottom at 1 pm around 8000 ft, the wet snow was ankle deep but the slope still barely supported a person on skis. We skinned back out on low angle slopes.

Cloud cover started to move into the area as we skinned out and skies became mostly cloudy to overcast by 2 pm.