Merry Christmas

I'm spending the week at the mother-in-laws home in the San Bernardino's of SoCal and we have a stellar snowfall to ring in another Christmas season. I took a few turns this afternoon in the mini-bowl contained within the "backyard" after digging a pit. I have to say...my first column isolation gave me a scary Q2 fracture at ~40cm depth on the surface between the 1st and 2nd storm of the season before I even started the test....basically as I was isolating the back of the column on a 30 degree slope. It was a surface characterized by very spherical graupel and sugery faceted crystals > 2mm in size with 4 finger density as the bedding surface for the Q2 failure. The overlying layers were fine grained stellar crystals <.5mm, ~30cm deep, and 1-2 finger density capped by a 10cm graupel/rain/ice layer. I isolated a few more columns in the same pit and got a safe 10-10-10 from the wrist, elbow and shoulder each time....so I chalked it up to a fluke and proceeded to ski the nastiest mank I've seen...ever. I gave up after 3 "runs" of roughly 200ft vertical per run....rain crust which barely broke under ski, but gave just enough to entrench my skis thus making it nearly impossible to bust out any sharp turn. After that...I drank more beer and took a walk with Mrs. maad and shot the following. Merry Christmas