Obvious signs of instability are decreasing, but you can still trigger slides that will grow large enough to bury you. It seems like the slab is getting thick enough in places that you wouldn't cause a failure in the faceted snow closer to the ground. However, if you find a thinner portion of the slab, you could easily affect these layers. While there are some places you might not cause a failure, I think there are more places that you could. I don't think it's time to seek out deeper portions of the slope just yet. The best management tool is still to simply avoid suspect slopes.

The west side of Vail Pass.

We parked at Vail Pass and rode snowmobiles to Ptarmigan Hill and Shrine Bowl and then returned to the truck.

We did not observe anything that made us change our idea of the snowpack in this area. There is a thickening cohesive slab resting on a thick layer of facets. Extended Column Test results were either non-propagating and related to the most recent snowfall, or they were propagating, failed after blows from the shoulder, and broke in the layer of faceted snow closer to the ground. We didn't observe any cracking or collapsing, but there were already lots of tracks in the area and we didn't want to get too close to any suspect slopes. We dug on a northeast-facing slope and a south-facing slope near treeline. Both pits were similar to what was described above, the only real difference was that the pit on the south-facing slope had melt-freeze crusts at the interfaces between layers while the other pit did not. There was about 30cm of new snow that was very low-density with some rimed grains. The December storm snow was "right-side up," ranging from one-finger on the Hand Hardness Scale to four-finger. That layer was capped by the most recent snow that was less than fist hard. The facets below this layer which comprise all of the snow from October through November were about four-finger hard with some weaker areas directly on either side of the two crust layers we found on the south-facing slope. On the northeast-facing slope, this layer was a bit weaker in general.

Light snow and winds. Temperatures in the teens. About one or two inches accumulated on the truck while we were in the field.