Unreactive buried surface hoar on Elephant's Hump

     We toured up and around Elephant's Hump today. The skies were clear and the temperature steadily climbed to above freezing throughout the morning. On the way up I stopped in two locations and dug pits on a North aspect and found buried surface hoar at both locations. In both spots the buried surface hoar was ~30cms down and showed  planar results on the compression tests 2x in each location; however, in both locations the ECT was nonreactive showing no propagation at all. In all, there was ~30 cms of new snow within this area from the last storm from the weekend  and an HS of 285cm @ 8300'. Snow conditions are still cold and unconsolidated on shaded aspects that made for great riding on the way down. As we continued up and broke tree line the wind started to pick up and blowing snow was observed in near tree line terrian but the wind effect was minimal. On Elephant's back proper there was large banners of blowing snow from west to east and large wind waves were visible on the face from monday's wind event so, it has now had wind scouring and some wind loading the last couple of days. As the temps continued to rise solar aspects started to heat up and wet surface snow started to form just before noon. Ski cuts on the way down did get some small pinwheel formation to grow but nothing that amounted to alot of movement; other than that, no other signs of instabiltiy were observed in the surrounding area.