Shallow wet loose instability on Hidden Peak.

I took a tour on Hidden Peak today to see conditions across a large elevation spectrum. Driving down Hwy 89 this morning, I noticed around 2 inches of new snow between Truckee and Tahoma that abruptly decreased south of Tahoma. There was about a half inch of new snow at the bottom of Hidden Peak that increased to only 1.5 inches at the summit. In nearly all areas this new snow was on top of melt-freeze crust. Above about 7,300' this crust was supportable. Below about 7,300' the crust was breakable.

Along the summit ridge, there was new wind slab up to 4 inches thick on slopes adjacent to cornice features. New growth on the edges of the cornices was weak and cracked easily. I was unable to trigger any amount of slab cracking on wind loaded test slopes adjacent to cornices in this area with ski kicks or ski cuts.

By noon, cloud cover was starting to thin just enough to allow for increased amounts on incoming solar radiation. On the descent at around 7,900' I started to trigger some rollerballs and very small pinwheels. Intentionally ski cutting a convex NE aspect terrain feature at 7,800' I was able to trigger a very shallow wet loose avalanche involving the 1 to 1.5 inches of new snow. From this elevation on down, large areas of rollerballs were triggered off of every turn.