Conditions were very good  up Diamond Head on Sunday jan 12. Probably about 80cm of fresh from Fri-sat. Road up was in good shape, easy driving. Could ski from the parking lot. The conditions will be changing rapidly with the warmer weather-- snow was heavier and icing up on the ski down by end of day. Avy conditions were better than expected. We skied only very conservative lines, but snow pits and cutting of steep rolls didn't show much instability.

Up at Elfin, shoulder of Columnar yesterday (Wed, Jan 15th).

Conditions were pretty gross - breakable crust anywhere below 1600m. Really tough skiing, the kind that you can torque your knee pretty easily in.

We dug a pit around 1650m and there was ~25cm wind slab/layer on top of a sliding (graupel?) layer. Not too reactive, but it did start to move slightly on a compression test w/ two taps from elbow. We all thought that this slab could get dicey in the next few days if the rising temperature warms it up / makes it heavy.

I thought I found one of the faceting / surface hoar layers at around 1.5m - everything between it and the above layer seemed pretty homogeneous which was good - the avy forecast keeps mentioning to watch out for it mainly in rocky/low areas - that makes sense to me as it is getting buried fairly deep.

Tough winter so far - hope everyone got some snow while the getting was good last weekend!

Yeah, challenging season for ice climbing too. Limited options...

 We found the same faceted/ surface hoar layer in a pit test on the Flute backside in Whistler last Sunday. About 1.5m down. Sudden break after several taps from the elbow. Also a small wind slab on top fractured, but this would not be enough for a large avy. It will be an interesting spring season if that deep layer decides to go.