Powder valley

Not much to report, but spent Saturday poking round Powder Valley on W through S aspects while the visibility lasted, and got sense of the snow surface and upper pack before Sunday's storm. Below tree line is all deep blower surface facets - 20cm ski pen and 40cm boot pen - which skied really pretty nicely. Tree line and above was all kinds of nasty - western aspects had a mixture of wind pressed / scoured slopes, combined with highly varying depths of wind slab around terrain features (from 10cm-40cm, all the way from fist to knife hardness in higher exposed terrain) overlaying a 30cm facet layer on top of ice, dirt and hard snow. Some shooting cracks traveling on hard windslab in isolated areas, but otherwise no reactivity. Winds picked up to 40km/hr + on ridge tops in the pm ahead of the incoming system. No avalanches observed.