Pete and MW shared tips that all feed into my own thinking. The "low angle slopes" thing of course can lead to "figure 11's" instead of wonderful turns when the recent snowfall is deep, or alternatively turns on wind-scoured snow that will give you a fun torture test (they say "there are safe places," not there are "safe places where you can be sure of having fun turns"). That's often led me to the east slopes, as when the snow is "too deep" on the crest, the east slopes can be "just right" for both trailbreaking and turning.
Regarding trees, indeed anything you can ski through can slide, and there are horror stories of body part recovery from slides in trees. That said, I've heard others here mention, and have noticed myself, that it seems like the snow on the ground in well-forested areas (where when you look up, you're seeing much more canopy than sky, versus mostly open areas speckled with trees) often doesn't seem to form into the highly elastic sort of slabs you can get in more open areas. I don't know if that's because the sintering windblown snow crystals are mostly up there in the forest canopy or what (or just rationalized wishful thinking), but at any rate, this is something I've seen again and again, but like any rule of thumb relating to life safety, use this one with extreme caution and at your own risk. Last weekend, for instance, I found obvious hard slabs in full forest, but these were w/in the first hundred vertical feet below the crest above 5K on what had been on the leeward side since the snow fell. Last winter, I watched a partner dislodge a slab maybe about 8 inches deep and 20 feet wide that ran down about 20-30 feet in this sort of forest, but in this case the snow in the forest also gave clues of being slabby (feel, small cracks next to uptrack at points, etc), not like the more slack snow I usually have seen there.
As to specifically where I would go, well, I'm with MW on this too...
