I was certainly rushed during this pit so my instability tests were not as clean as I would have liked but my results seem to align with what I thought the weak layers in the snowpack were. From what I observed I can say that this specific area in the snowpack is gaining stability and becoming more uniform. This area on Vail mountain gets a fair amount of wind but this pit site is in a somewhat sheltered area so I suspect most of the interfaces I was observing were from solar radiation since it was on a southern aspect and that could also be why I am not seeing much faceting occuring and overall stability of the snowpack increasing. I did forget to record my ski/boot penetration most likely because I was working and trying to get done as quickly as possible. I would like to try to do my next test pit without any time constraints just so I can think through the process and begin to get a routine for test pits that is different from my routine for full profile pits.
Between my two pits in the Vail/Summit county I can see some similarities in that the snowpack seems to be mostly uniform and I did not have much trouble identifying layers. My pit 1 had a melt freeze crust below new snow that made sense since we had a stretch of relatively warm and sunny weather previously and it was in a sheltered S facing meadow below treeline. My test pit, Pit 3, only had minimal results on the old snow interface about 36 cm down at what would most likely be the same old snow as the melt freeze crust I was observing at pit site 1 just deeper due to more snow and a deeper snowpack in general at a higher altitude. Pit site 2 was just mayhem in the Sawatch. Many layers of wind packed rounds and very difficult to find any individual layers of concern and most of the layers that broke during tests I had not even identified while doing my layer identification. Though Pits 2 and 3 were similar elevation they were opposite aspects so I think the solar radiation combined with a large difference in wind explain why the two pits are so drastically different.