Small wind slabs near Frog Lake.

     I toured out to Frog lake today, there was a couple inches of new snow sitting on top of melt freeze crusts and old cold snow along the PCT out towards Elephants Back. Along the way to Frog Lake I came across a variety of wind effected areas and even some very small wind slabs on isolated features. I traveled along the ridge looking for more pockets of wind slabs on N-NW-W facing aspects and found only a few, the wind slabs I did find were stiff and required good force for initiation that did not crack or propagate very far. I stopped on a North aspect @ 8700' and dug a pit looking for buried surface hoar, to my surprise I found a 3cm layer of buried graupel that was 3-5mm in size. This layer was weak as the graupel would pour out as my shovel passed by it. This layer would have failed more during my compression test but there was not much of a slab above it. As I looked at my surrounding area I could see how this area was susceptible to additional loading/pooling of graupel from wind. As the day progressed the sun was blocked by high gray cirrus clouds  that prevented solar radiation from warming up the snow on any aspect during my tour into the early afternoon. Looking around Round Top and the Sisters I saw no signs of recent avalanches or instabilities within above tree line terrain or anywhere else during my tour.