Feb 2, 2011, sluffs on Granite Mountain

We made attempt at Granite Mountain today.  Got a late start, around 9:30.  Sunny today with a high of 35.  We hiked a couple miles in summery forest before encountering any real patches of snow (snow level ~3500', trailhead ~1900').  Hiked further on patches of dense snow/ice until we hit the avalanche runout near treeline.  The runout had firm snow with almost complete coverage, so we turned from the trail and bootpacked up it.  Had we left an hour earlier it might have wanted crampons, but our toe kicks gained enough purchase to make it relatively uneventful.  As we left the trees behind and ascended towards the main ridge the upper layer of snow softened a bit, but there remained a very hard crust 2"-4" underneath.  Looking around it seemed that about 75% of the open snow was covered in sluff debris.  Most of the remaining 25% was crust that had lost its covering wet snow. 
As our bootpack neared the top around noon (we never had to put skins on) a descending skier set loose a hundred or so softball to football-sized spindrels, some of which gathered into a slow-moving but ~2' deep loose slide that took a small gully most of the way back down to the trees.  That was a good excuse to turn around, so we traversed to a slightly lower angle slope.  Awkward but fun enough skiing, with very loose, shallow snow atop a very slippery crust.  Carving wasn't in the cards - lots of slipping and sliding about.  Looking back up at the large open face about the avy runout, pretty much the entire view was bare crust or small sluff debris at this point.  The deeper snowfall higher elevations supposedly got the last half week was never evident to us, though we didn't make it entirely to the top. 
For the next weej: if all the sluff debris does survive the coming rain and harden, it won't take much snow to cover it up.  It's generally small and consistently-sized, so not much sticks out enough to hold death cookie promise.