Less Than Expected Refreeze on Jakes Peak

With cooler overnight temperatures and clear skies, we were expecting a good refreeze of the snow surface this morning on Jakes Peak.  We started off with some soft, but supportable snow from the trailhead.  The E aspect snow surface was warm and wet by time we arrived mid morning with a shallow melt freeze crust below the wet surface snow.  As we skinned higher, the snow surface became mostly more supportive.  We did find areas around manzanita bushes and rocks where a shallow snowpack existed that was more soft, punchy, and unsupportable than the main gully feature.  We descended at 11am with good travel conditions on the top 1500'.  Once below 7500', the snow surface became slower, less supportive, and sticky.  The optimum time for descending on E/SE aspects with todays conditions would have been closer to 10-10:30am.