Beauty Day in Barnes

Great views with clear skies today in the Barnes area. Temperatures were tolerable at -13 warming to -7 at staging. There was 10 - 15 cm new snow over various old surfaces of soft snow from last week and crusts on steep south-facing slopes. We dug a couple of profiles looking for the January 30 surface hoar layer. Both were on north-facing slopes the first one was a more exposed alpine feature where we found no concerning layers in the upper snowpack. The second was on a sheltered treeline feature where we found two layers a graupel/facet layer that was unreactive and the surface hoar layer down 110 cm . Tests done on this layer were resistant and in the hard range. (DTT (26) RP down 110 on rounding surface hoar) We saw no new avalanches and skied a north-facing slope where there was some great snow.