Dec 19, 2006, Arrowhead, Stevens Pass

What was powder the day before sure changed.  Justin, his brother Jake, and I arrived at the ventilator with cold temps. but a freezing rain/fog coming down.  At first the snow stayed light but at about 4200 feet we climbed into what I am guessing was a warm west flow inversion.  By 5400 feet we decided to turn around as the snow was rapidly turning into mashed potatoes and we thought below it might still be good.  Well, enough precip. had fallen that the snow was rather wet all the way back.  Still turnable and a fun day out anyway.  I am pretty sure that the snow surface is wet enough to form a breakable crust with nighttime low temps.  With a quick compression test at our turnaround we couldn't even get the 10 inches of new over last week's raincrust to go with all 30 taps (32 degree slope).  We simply smashed it down.  The lower snowpack seemed to be bonding nicely as well.