No obvious signs of instability on Waterhouse Peak.

We started up Waterhouse Peak and did some probing just above Grass Lake in the 7,800' to 8,000' range where another party had triggered whumpfing on Jan 7. The weak layer of old faceted snow was felt at the bottom of the snowpack, but it represented only about the bottom 5 to 6 inches of the 3 foot deep snowpack in that area. Above that was several feet of very strong and supportable snow, making up the rest of the snowpack. In this zone, the ground surface is very rocky and should now anchor the weak layer, with anchors extending up into the strong snow above. On the rest of our ascent to the summit at ~9,500', we broke trail all the way and encountered no collapsing. 

Along the summit ridge, there were numerous wind loaded N aspect test slopes to work with. The cornices on some of these slopes were easy to collapse with a single ski kick, but did not fracture the slope below. In nearly all areas we ski cut and jumped on, no fracture of wind slab occurred. In one spot we created a very minor crack in wind slab (photo).

Surface hoar was present in below treeline openings above 9,000'. At 9,000' it was small at 2 to 5 mm and increased to 10 mm in size along and on top of the summit ridge (~9,500').

The upside-down upper snowpack from the 1/7 snowfall continues to consolidate in this area and now provides supportable travel conditions top to bottom on the peak.