2ft of storm snow at Pickett Peak

Anticipating accidents and closures on Carson Pass today, and factoring that into my safety margins, I ended up at Pickett Peak even though I knew there was no base from previous storms there. 

There was about 2ft of new snow here by mid-day (pic 1). It did display some subtle "upside down" qualities, with heavier snow on top of lighter, but overall all the new snow was heavy and wet. I did find several places with just a few inches of old snow under the new. This older layer appeared to have previously been facets, but was wetted by the initial warm snow yesterday. Shovel tilts and hand shears did not show any planar results within the new snow, but I did get consistent failures where I could test the new/old interface.

My go-to test slopes in this area were still just barely covered piles of rocks, so I was unable to stomp on continuous patches of snow today. I did use larger snow covered rocks as test slopes, and got shooting cracks limited to the size of the rocks (pic 2). Mitt pits in the cracks did not show any old snow under the new, so the cracking was within the storm snow.

Video: Winds were damaging, with tree branches breaking off and true white-out conditions during gusts. Flagging on trees indicated a NW wind, but gusts were highly variable in direction. The less-treed slope in the video has a slightly west-of-north aspect, and was probably thinner in coverage due to wind scouring.