East fork Hyalite

I went on a xc ski up to Heather Lake today (my first ski of the season!), and thought I’d share what I saw. I expected to find signs of instability, given the new snow and our mediocre snowpack, but did not really see much to note. During the entire ski, I got one collapse on a small, shallow wind drift that was localized to within a foot of my ski. I observed a couple small sloughs off of higher terrain, but they failed to run very far or propagate into a slab. The only real activity I saw was on a west-facing road cut on the drive up (photo). This outing really didn’t give me enough information to ski off of—except to note that it is probably too early to ski—but the signs were encouraging.