Dude.....what month is this?

Leaving the mid-80's behind on Friday, I drove north until I could see the frosted peaks on the horizon.  Meeting JMoney up at PnT for happy hour, I proceeded to have a few beers....and then some of the best Pizza to be found in all of Flagstaff.  Waking the next morning at a respectable hour, we ate our breakfast burritos in anticipation of the 4-8 inches we expected.....rumors of knee deep in bounds the day before buoyed our spirits.  Upon reaching Dutchmans...we found 3 inches of blower.....well....AZ blower for that matter....but it was close.  Below that was a solid mass of melt freeze that was not going anywhere, anytime soon.  Thoughts of skiing on my birthday 2 days before the solstice are really starting to seem possible....

Topping out on the ridge to the south of Allison Clay, the wind picked up on que with sustained winds estimated in the 40's, gusts in the 60's....with a constant snow-blast from the graupel that was being stripped off of the north ridge of Allison Clay and being shot at us like a shotgun blast of ice.  Moving south out of the wind and under the protection of the southern ridge, we found a nice place to peer out into the Inner Basin and dig a pit.

It was obvious from digging that the new snow was bonded fairly well to the underlying melt-freeze crust, yet I performed an ECT getting an ECTN6 Q2 down 6cm, and then an ECTN18 Q3 down 54cm at the new snow -melt freeze interface.

Results from the pit are found in this profile posted via Snow Pilot.

JMoney and his special lady friend dropped in while I shot pics and waited for them to bootpack back out of the shot while I played with grain types under the lens.

The rest of the day saw us descending back down the route we came, enjoying rooster tail turns up high on chalky and forgiving wind blown....transitioning rapidly to mashed potatoes down low making for a trying traverse out to the car.  We all agreed over PBR's in the parking lot that given our lack of skiing pow this late in April on the peaks....ever....the existing paradigm of a late start to let the corn snow develop in the sun was misplaced for this particular snowpack....an earlier start time will benefit us greatly in the future.....which is looking to be late next week for the next storm!  I'm currently in the 5th month of the ski season...May will be the 6th month.....my bike is starting to suspect I'm having an affair.....