Avalanche observation from Castle, snowpit on Andesite

We toured Castle Peak area to hunt for wind slabs. We first observed that there was only a little new snow. The surface snow was light. The cornices on Castle Pass were touchy and it did not take much to get them to break. No cracking or collapsing was observed and at the highest elevation of our tour about 8600' we only observed about 10 cm of new snow. On the NE side of Castle Peak there was a natural windslab avalanche that looked to have possibly failed on surface hoar because it appeared to have propagated very wide. This likely happened early in the storm as the debris field had new snow on it. Skiing down the NW trees of Castle the ski quality was good in wind-sheltered areas. WNW off of Andesite Ridge we dug a pit to see if we could find buried surface hoar. We did identify a layer @ 175CM that had rounding and broken surface hoar our pit tests did not give us concerning results. The ski quality down back to the trailhead was good.