Castle Peak Obs

We toured throughout the Castle and Andesite Peak areas today on a backcountry ski course for TMS.  The weather was beautiful with clear skies and cool temperatures.  NE winds were mostly in the light range with some moderate winds especially above 8000'.  The recent storm deposited around 2-4'' of new snow, with some light wind scouring evidence from the previous SW winds yesterday and then again from recent NE winds overnight and into today.  There was no obvious cracking in wind loaded terrain off of ridgelines at least up to our high point of 8400', but there was plenty of wind scouring at the higher elevations of Castle Peak.  Solar aspects and shaded aspects both had soft snow on top of a supportable crust.  Heavily treed terrain showed more variability with refrozen tree drippings and tree bombs.