Variable conditions in and out of Meiss Meadow.

     We toured up and over into Meiss Meadow today. On our climb up a S facing aspect, we encountered a variety of snow surfaces from thick breakable melt freeze crusts, wind buffed pow and supportable smooth snow. There was also signs of wind loading in old skins tracks but not a considerable amount else where. Once we reached the summit of 9452' the wind was blowing light to moderate out of the SW but was not transporting any snow that we could see. The surrounding ridge lines had heavy wind effected snow and was scoured down to the rocks from the recent winds earlier this week. As we descended into Meiss Meadow snow became soft and provided good skiing down. On the way up I stopped and dug in several areas to investigate signs of buried surface hoar. My range was from 8300' to 9000' on NW-N-NE aspects in BTL/NTL terrain along the way. I completed a handful of shovel tilt tests, a few compression tests and looked through the loop but could not find any evidence of buried surface hoar within the top 30cms of snow. There was a mix of slight wind effect BTL and some areas where snow was moist in the top 10cms of snow suggesting surface hoar was maybe broken down at some point. As we continued back up and over cloud cover continued to increase and limiting the amount of solar radiation. No other signs of instability was observed through out the day.