Warming conditions and wet snow on Rubicon Peak, all aspects.

We toured Rubicon Peak this morning. Snowcover continues to thin at the trailhead, but improved above 7,200'. We also transitioned from surface crust to recent new snow at this same elevation. Surface snow remained cold for most of the morning hours, entering into melt phase around 10:30 to 11am. As we ascended up to near treeline terrain, signs of wind effect on the snow surface, shallow surface wind slabs, and light amounts of blowing snow became obvious. All of the wind slabs we saw were unreactive to stubborn to trigger at best. It was difficult to create any wind slab cracking without first undercutting the slab. Even then it needed to be loaded very close to the undercut to crack.

We starting descending from just below the summit rock at 8,800' around 11:20 am. The surface snow on E aspects at that elevation was starting to become wet at that time. We moved over to NNE to NE aspect terrain for our descent. By the time we had descended to 8,500' on these more northerly aspect slopes, we began to encounter wet snow that became very wet by the time we had descended back 7,500'. Roller balls and pinwheels were easy to trigger on steeper rollovers. Conditions felt prime for wet loose avalanches in steeper terrain on any aspect.