Approaching Storm on Donner Summit

We skied in the Mt. Judah area to look at current conditions and see when the approaching storm would come in.  As we started skinning up, we had light winds with partly sunny skies.  Snow surface conditions were a mix of crusts, and recent snow-some of which had been rained on, but smooth surface conditions existed in many areas.  We found soft spring corn snow on the south side of Judah, E aspects were soft and smooth, and N aspects were slightly more punchy with a semi supportable surface crust.  Snow supportability was good on E-S aspects, but did decrease as we went below 7600' where surface crusts were not as strong and wet snow made up most of the upper snowpack.  SW winds increased into the moderate range as the sun went away with increased cloud cover by 11am.  Light snow started earlier than expected around 11:30am.  No signs of instability were observed today.