Crusty conditions to Crater Lake

We were greeted with a 5 cm thick breakable crust on the surface en route to Crater Lake today. The visibility was obscured due to falling snow and moderate to strong southwesterly winds, but we didn’t see any new avalanches. We dug on a SE facing slope at 1600 m and found 145 cm of total snow. We were able to get propagating Extended Column Test (ECT) results on a layer of buried surface hoar 35cm deep. We found the December 23 weak layer 65 cm deep but did not have any results on this layer today. The freezing level today was around 1300 m, dropping throughout the afternoon.