Building Reactive Wind Slabs on Lincoln Ridge

We went to Lincoln Ridge in the Yuba Pass area today.  The current storm began snowing this morning with snowfall rates up to 2''/hour.  Winds were gale force in exposed areas and also in treed areas with intense blowing snow throughout the day.  Small reactive wind slabs formed quickly this morning with 1F hard wind slab over F hard softer snow producing small wind slab avalanches on test slopes.  We also had consistent cracking around our skis with the recent storm snow and snow from the Sat storm that showed some storm snow instabilities.  We dug multiple snowpits at different locations to see if any persistent weak layers were reactive.  We did not find any of the graupel layers that have been causing issues in other areas.  Some weaker snow did exist around the Mar 14 rain crust, but snowpack tests did not show any unstable results.