Observation: Girdwood

We started on the highway and toured up to about 2350 ft. Our objective for the day was to measure snow depth and SWE at mid to high elevation. Skinning up through the forest was challenging on the icy shallow snow. We encountered lots of surface hoar at about 1500-1800 ft of elevation right at treeline. Snow surface was breakable (~1-2” sun crust) all the way up to our high point and didn’t soften up. Skiing down we stuck closer to the avalanche gully and we were happily surprised how far down we could ski before having to switch to hiking.
We didn’t perform any formal stability tests, and we didn’t observed any red flags.