Light to moderate blowing snow and pockets of weak facets in the Elephant's Hump area.

We toured Elephant's Hump today, looking at blowing and drifting snow as well as the buried Feb 14 facet layer. New snow amounts in the Red Lake area were just under 1 inch. We observed up to 2 inches while driving along Hwy 50 on the E Shore of Lake Tahoe this morning and more like a trace further north. Light to moderate amounts of blowing snow were visible with plumes over above treeline peaks in the Carson Pass and Luther Pass areas.

Touring on Elephant's Hump, E aspects were mostly scoured back to the old snow surface. We saw a few areas where up to 3 inches of drifted snow had deposited on the NW side of micro terrain features on N aspects. Cracking was extremely limited in these areas and wind slabs did not extend very far from the immediate lee area.

We found pockets of quite weak Feb 14 facets buried under 6-8 inches of more recent storm snow in a number of areas. All of these pocket locations were heavily shaded sections of N to NE aspect slopes. Moving out of the edge of the shade and into sun exposure, the facet layer was immediately much stronger. We performed an ECT and a PST at the noted lat/long (shaded NE aspect just shy of 8,000') and did not get any propagation. Boot penetration into the weak facet layer at this location was close to 1 foot deep. The slab was 4F to 1F hard with only a very thin melt-freeze crust at its base. This slab was on top of F hard, 2mm, dry, loose grained facets formed during the Jan/Feb dry spell. In these pockets of weaker snow, there is still insufficient load on top of the faceted weak layer to create an avalanche problem.