A complex snowpack and avalanche situation exists at the moment. The easy and obvious part is fresh sensitive wind slabs today as discussed above. Beyond that, it is much more complex. The latest storm did not bring nearly as much snow as anticipated, and snowlines remained quite high for the bulk of it. While this definitely resulted in less of an increase in overall avalanche danger, it actually added more complexity to the avalanche problem. Had we gotten 3’+ of new snow, widespread natural avalanches would have been much more likely, hopefully resulting in either the cleaning out of some of the deeper weak layers that have been the focus of recent concern, or burying them deeper where they can begin to start strengthening. As it turns out, enough snow has fallen likely to have led only to a few isolated natural avalanches, leaving the questionable snowpack even more questionable and perhaps closer to the brink of slope-wide failures. The wind slab problem is the immediate and obvious problem for today. Less obvious is the possibility that one of these smaller slides could be the stress necessary to trigger one of these deeper layers and result in a much larger more destructive avalanche. As the storm slab and wind slab problems settle, then we are left with overall more weight and slab ontop of the weaker underlying pack, where a person could conceivably find a thinner weaker spot that could propagate a failure across an entire slope. This problem could last for awhile! It will be important to dig and investigate in coming days, and use conservative decision making to avoid a potentially deadly avalanche until we learn more.