Observation: Chugach State Park

calm and temps near freezing. Bits of sunshine poking through

Mostly rain crust. Pretty terrible for skiing. I never took my skins off.

I dug to the side of a main slide path. Snow in the path was >1m deep, where I dug it ranged 65-85cm.

2600ft, SSW aspect, 31deg slope, depth of pit 80cm.

2-5mm rain crust on the surface. Where this crust formed over old stiff wind board it almost supported a skier, but in most places it was easily breakable.
The majority of the snowpack is a 4-finger density slab, but some parts of my pit wall were 1-finger for 40-50cm. I think this was the "waves" of old wind drifts and sastrugi buried mid-pack, since the thickness and depth varied across my pit.
The 10-15cm at the bottom was loose facets, fist-density or less.

ECTN 12, the top 30cm of the column mostly collapsed.
ECTP25 at 50-60cm down, this was a non-planar propagation.
The block came off with a very chunky base and I could not find a continuous weak layer. It looked like water from the rain event had percolated down through the snow pack and fanned out when it hit subtle density changes. I found a few frozen vertical "straws" linking the surface crust to mid-pack frozen lenses of various diameters, but very thin. These lenses were not connected, or even at a consistent depth. I think they were forming along buried sastrugi features. This was enough to cause propagation in my ECT, but I don't know if this would be enough to propagate on a larger scale, or if this percolated snowpack is widespread in Ship Creek.

No other signs of instability noted.