The way the snow held today – a quiet layer of graupel under wind slab

Spent the morning digging a pit on a north-facing slope, and there it was: a perfect little graupel layer, like tiny Styrofoam beads, sitting right under a stiff wind slab. It's the kind of thing that makes you laugh nervously because you know exactly what it wants to do, but right now it's just waiting. Patrollers get a weird appreciation for failure modes.