Weather, snowpack & avalanche conditions Mini Morrison

It was good to get out and feel the full power of the weather and mountains today. John Muir would have approved. To say the least it was WINDY. I got blown over a few times and toured in goggles, and by late afternoon the winds abated a bit that I could continue on. At points I considered aborting the tour all together because of the sandblasting affect, but was glad to stick with it. Old mans bowl was almost completely stripped in areas and in the gut it was around 45-60 cm of faceting snow capped with varying degrees of windboard. The east facing gullies on Mini Morrison harbored primarily faceting snow around 30-60 cm deep. Textured areas were soft and other smoother sections were supportable thin wind slab over facets. There were active cascading streams of windblown snow streaming off the cliffs and down the center of the gullies (see attached video).  The snowpack structure is variable and weak up high in the steep terrain- it will be interesting to see what happens with the next larger loading event. There was one small avalanche that had slid at the bottom of the skiers right side gully on a convex roll. The slab was 10" in depth, 50' wide and ran 75' vertical. It appeared to be a wind slab or potentially an area where a lot of accumulated streaming snow had been deposited after it moved down the main east gully. The slab (Pencil hard) had slid on a 2-3cm (Fist) layer of faceted snow on the ground. When I ski cut adjacent to the previous slide it propagated immediately and filled the gully. Deposition was around 2-3' deep. All the east gullies run into a major terrain trap so travelling wisely is a must. Snow in the sage brush is just barely deep enough to travel on to access and egress the mini morrison zone.