Batch Plant area NE facing gully above convict lake road

A pit was dug on E-N-E facing slope, about 1/2 way up.  See attached profile.  The layer of concern was toward the bottom of this 1.5 meter snowpack.  25cm of large crystals at the base (mostly rounded facets) had a thin knife hard crust overlying it with a few cm layer on top of the crust of 4finger minus snow (rounded facets).  CT tests consistently failed above this crust in this weak soft layer of snow with very energetic clean planar Q1 shears, from 1 wrist tap! (scary, likely a fluke, so 4 more tests were done) to 25 taps, then 20 taps, then 13 taps.  One last CT test caused failure below this crust in the large basal crystals, 25 taps, Q2.  It would have been nice to have dug one or two more pits on this slope to see what kind of spatial variability existed.   Interestingly, no failures resulted in the other suspect crust/weak layer combos higher up in the pack.  Besides these CT tests and wet sloughs that occured when sunlight was hitting the slope more directly (I was there after 12 noon, and these sloughs were no longer a concern), no other signs of instability were observed.  In addition to today, the slope had been skied by one skier the previous day, without incident.   Great snow conditions (boot top pow) for the upper half which was North East facing, the lower half was much more directly east facing and had much more sun affect (thick, but not bad).