Today was a day of many laps...
A small disturbance moved through late Tuesday / early Wednesday depositing 12" of 7% snow. Supposedly the winds were cranking during the night, pushing the danger to considerable. Starting from Alta, we slogged it up to just below Cardiff Pass as the tail end of the storm was pushing through. On the final pitch, we had a couple of collapses, presumably of the old crusted surface, but the storm snow on top had not formed any slab. Being cautious, we decided to do a couple of runs on the LCC side first - skiing Hellgate Trees and East Hellgate. It became quite clear at this point that we would need to find slopes with some angle: there was rather a lot of snow. We were also getting through to the prior surface which made for some interesting skiing. Still, it was powder, and it was gladly received!
We then moved from the pass into Cardiff taking the benign line down to the base of Toledo. It was clear that the N-facing was going to be pretty epic: first face-shots of the year (come to think of it, I dont remember any last year, apart from a 40mph face-plant at the 'bird when my Fritschi's broke) and no wind-damage. By this time it had stopped snowing, but the visibility was fairly dreadful. It appeared to be one of those strange situations where there isn't enough wind to push the disturbance out of the canyon, so it remains foggy. What followed from there were 5 (or 6?, I lost count) laps of Power Line Ridge, skiing the various roll-overs to the RHS. The skiing was excellent - not hitting any rocks underneath - with Pow all over the place. The snow wasn't moving either, allowing us to take out the nice-steep lines off the ridge.
The sun looked like it might come out and we couldn't keep our eyes off Cardiac Ridge. By the time we could see the top, it was too much effort for us (well, AC) to break trail for one lap. We also noticed that the lookers left line, which faces more NE, had slid. We couldn't see the crown but it did not appear to have stepped down. The slide was perhaps 75 x 800ft.
We exited via the slightly dodgy climb back up to Cardiff Pass. There was a little settlement, but again, there did not appear to be any sort of cohesive slab on top. The ski down to Alta involved hitting a few rocks, but all in all, one of the best Powder days for a long time. 6,100ft clocked.