Mostly Firm Conditions on Judah

We delayed our tour till the afternoon tour in hopes of giving the sun more time to work on the snow surface. On the skin up we found a mix of breakable crusts, firm scoured surfaces, and a few isolated patches of softer snow on the northerly aspects. We detoured onto some sheltered W aspects while skinning and found soft corn snow on top of a supportable base on those at 2 pm. As we neared the summit of Judah, we ended up taking skis off and kicking steps up the more exposed slopes due to slippery firm skinning conditions. Once on the ridge we checked out the E-SE-S-SW-W aspects looking for places where softer corn snow existed. We found firm icy conditions on all of these aspects near the ridgeline. Since we had seen soft snow on lower elevation sheltered W aspects we carefully made our way down the firm snow going west. Once we descended about 200 ft, the snow surfaces started to soften and we found decent corn skiing with 2-5 cm (1-2 in) of soft wet snow on a supportable base. We did not see any signs of snowpack instability today.