Minor wind slab and minor loose wet on Silver Peak

We toured Silver Peak today, focusing on terrain visible along the E ridge and on the NE side of the peak. Snow in the shadows remain cold, snow in the sun will have a thin, breakable sun crust or melt-freeze crust on it tomorrow morning, especially below about 7,500'. The recent new snow has undergone some settlement increasing the density up to 4F+ at the base of the storm snow while remaining F hard at the surface.

While wind out of the NW seemed light all day, we did encounter ridgetop skin track refill from light amounts of drifting snow in ridgetop areas. Moving over to the normally corniced north ridge of Silver Peak, we ski cut some wind pillows and were able to trigger a very shallow, but wide propagating wind slab that had formed from the light drifting snow today. The slab was only 3 inches thick and did not extend more than a few feet downhill, but it propagated 30 feet wide. There is still lots of lower density recent storm snow in ridgetop areas that is available for drifting if the winds increase again.

We dug a number of hand pits looking for old faceted snow below the recent storm snow. We performed ECTs in two locations. One with a lesser developed facet layer scored ECTX and the other where there was a more developed facet layer scored ECTN-14. The ECTN location (noted lat/long) was a well shaded N aspect at 7,600'. No signs of snowpack instability associated with the buried facet layer was observed in this area today.