Wet Snow and Variable Surfaces on Tallac

The thin high clouds did little to hinder today's warming. Sun-exposed E aspects below 7500 ft already had a thin layer of soft wet snow on them by 10:30 am. Whenever we moved onto more shady N-NE aspects, we found a mix of supportable and semi-supportable crusts on the surface. We dug into the snow on the shady aspects. We could feel softer snow in some places, but we did not see any signs of instability associated with the buried weaker snow. In some areas, we could not find buried weak snow. 

Once we got up into the more exposed near and above treeline terrain, we found firm wind-sculpted surfaces mixed with some areas of smooth snow. On the N-NE aspects, this snow remained cold and dry. We moved over to the E and ESE facing slopes and found wet snow similar to what we had seen at the lower elevations. A ski cut on a steep test slope did cause a small shallow sluff of wet loose snow. This wet snow existed on top of a thin crust on top of more wet snow, making travel conditions inconsistent. We tried moving over to more sunny SE-facing slopes in hopes of finding more established melt-freeze conditions, but we just found deeper wet snow. We moved back onto the E aspects where the wet snow was less deep. As we dropped below 8200 ft, more dense snow existed below the wet snow, and the conditions became more consistent.