Cold snow on Powderhouse

  I toured up to the top of Powderhouse peak today. The weather was pretty calm most of the day with a little bit of everything, few high cirrus clouds, light with moderate gusts of S winds across the lake and at the summit, no transporting snow was observed. Air temperatures were mild, floating around the freezing mark, sun and shade depending. Grass lake is very hard and traveled fast. At the W edge of grass lake and the base of tree line I came across a surface hoar factory in a fairly large isolated pocket. It was impressive at the size, depth and growth within this area. There were other isolated pockets along my tour that had other large facets but were in common protected areas that produce surface hoar growth. The ascent had variable snow and was mostly manageable for skinning, only steeper pockets of facets would I slip out. Otherwise any open or exposed areas was hard wind packed snow or ice bombs under the drip lines of trees. Wind affected snow did increase at treeline and to the summit. One thing that was consistent to the top was the scattered debris across the slopes, twigs, needles and branches were everywhere. It took a while to find a protected area to dig a pit. I finally found one at 8400'  on N aspect, there was 5cm of soft facets above a thin ice crust and a 3cm soft layer of facets below the crust. I did a compression test and got non-planar results right above the crust but should be monitored on the next storm cycle. On the descent I stayed in the shade and tried to read and run to pockets of softer snow, in some cases I did come across deeper pockets of facets that would produce some small loose dry surface movement on slopes above 35 degrees. Solar aspects never seemed to heat up on any of the surrounding terrain or on sunny aspects within the trees. Warm soft snow was hard to find today. From the summit there was not signs of any new instability around Steven's, Showers chutes or Scott's lake.