Snow Pit Upper Castle Creek

Toured up Castle Valley today sticking to low angle / below treeline terrain.  The weather in the morning was snowing hard, the winds were light to moderate with strong gusts out of the Southwest.  Breaking trail was not too difficult due to the supportive moist snow from the previous day, ski penetration was 15-25 cm.  We found wind loaded test slopes that produced shooting cracks and a small 10cm wind slab to release.  We stopped at 7570' above upper Castle Creek to dig on a slightly west aspect to investigate the buried facets (persistent weak layer).  We found fist hard facets under recent storm snow that failed easily in a compression test (CTE-SC down 75cm).