Reactive Weak Layer on Relay Peak

We toured up to the Relay Peak area to see how the old weak faceted snow was supporting the new storm snow.  Early season conditions exist throughout this area.  New storm snow amounts ranged from 12-20'' of dense snow with a noticeable heavier layer of storm snow on the surface.  As we neared 9000', we started experiencing whumpfing sounds and shooting cracks on northerly below treeline terrain.  On a small steeper slope above a creek bed, we got the slope to fail with large shooting cracks across the slope and below.  We triggered this slope remotely from the flats above the slope. The slope ranged from 30-34 degrees in steepness on a NW-N aspect, but the slope did not avalanche.  We encountered many other whumpfing sounds and cracking throughout our tour with multiple test pits showing the old faceted snow near the ground was failing with the new snow load-see snowpit.  Many steeper slopes that we thought would be reactive still have a lot of anchors (rocks, trees, bushes, etc) that were breaking up the slope with a still shallow snowpack.

Previous and current wind transport was observed throughout the day.  Wind direction appeared to change more to a south wind during the day with intense wind transport at times.  Small reactive wind slabs were ski cut along the ridge in near treeline areas.