Weak to decent refreeze on Relay Peak.

We toured the E end of Relay Peak during the latter half of this morning to gauge last night's refreeze (suspected poor) and how quickly potentially unstable deep wet snow was developing. Under areas of very heavy forest canopy around 8,500' there had been almost no overnight refreeze of the snow surface. Moving onto open slopes and ascending towards 9,700' we encountered up to 4 inches of decent snow surface refreeze that was melting quickly. There were also poorly refrozen pockets and moats around heat sinks such as partially exposed rocks and bushes/small trees along ridgetops. By 11 am as the melt progressed, we started to find areas of unsupportable wet snow on previously supportable open slopes. We avoided slopes 35 degrees and steeper on our descent to minimize any exposure to the wet loose avalanche problem.

On the SE-S aspects, we traveled we encountered well established melt-freeze layers in the upper snowpack. On the N-NE-E aspects we looked at, the upper snowpack was still transitional with snow layers that had yet to undergo melt only a few inches below the snow surface.