Scout peak

 Upon our arrival at 08:45 @ 7200' clouds were high in the sky and it was lightly snowing. There was about 1cm of new snow laying on top of the Jan. 2 melt freeze crust. For the next hour we had intermittent light snow fall, then around 10:00 cloud levels dropped and the wind and snowfall really picked up. From this time on, snow was intensely transporting by saltation from west to east, leaving behind the Jan. 2 MFC layer on the surface in these areas and loading any depression in its path. These small isolated pockets of loaded areas were forming soft wind slabs and were easily triggered from a ski. Around 7500' I dug a 90cm hasty pit on a west facing slope and conducted an ECT that scored ECTP26 on the Dec.11th layer. As we got higher in elevation the gale force winds were sustained and snowfall continued to increase. As we toured around to a protected NE aspect @ 8300', I completed a full pit there. While completing my pit we had two instances where graupel started falling pretty heavy covering the surface of the snow all around us. Compression tests within the pit scored CT11@7cm down Q1, CT16@15cm down Q2 and CT18@45cm down Q3 on the Dec.11th layer. There was no results on my ECT. The ride down consisted of variable skiing through pockets of the exposed Jan. 2 crust, wind drifts, and pockets of new snow. Around 7500' @ 13:00 rain was consistently falling and did so all the way to the truck @ 7200'.