My McPherson South West Shoulder

Nearly 30 cm of fresh snow in the last 48 hrs

Extremely reactive surface hoar layer at 50cm depth. When touring up, whumpfing occurred as soon as weight was applied to a previously un-collapsed area (for our own previous whumpf). Cracks would appear as far as 15-20 meters away from us in all directions. The worst crack caused a small (3 meters wide) unsupported slab to pop, 15 meters uphill from us. We skinned in extremely dense trees before skinning back downhill because it was unskiably dense. That said, I would not have skied anything remotely sparse in that area given our observations. We dug a pit at the bottom to check out the hoar and observed a complete shear propagation at the 14th tap on an extended column. Hoar layer was 2cm thick.