Schallenberger Ridge

While ascending Schallenberger Ridge this morning we stopped in a sheltered north facing clearing, to look for buried surface hoar.  One member of our party had seen surface hoar in this location on Monday. We did three shovel tilt/tap tests all of which behaved similarly. After 10+ taps to the underside of the shovel while tilting the blade, the slab broke on the new old snow interface. We looked at the bottom/bed surface of two of these tests and could not see any crystals with right angles, only whole and broken stellars. We also looked for surface hoar in this location as we could feel a temperature inversion as we ascended, but we only found stellars and fragments. The ridgeline near the summit showed moderate signs of wind effect. This wind effect did not extend far down the north facing slope below. We did not see any cornices formed from this new snow, but we did kick at a couple small cornices formed from last weeks storm snow for good measure. Thorough kicking at a 1 foot cornice eventually caused it to fail, but no cracking was seen below the failure. On the way out, we looked at the north face of Donner Peak, which seemed to have much more pervasive wind effect than we observed while skiing.