Specimen creek

Toured up into specimen creek today. Pretty thin coverage all around - lots of sagebrush and rocks poking up on solar aspects, NE pockets skied decent. Dug a quick snow pit on a NE aspect around 7700 ft. There was a dense wind slab (about 4-5 in thick) on top of the pack in this spot, which failed on isolation in our ECT. Kept tapping and the rest of the pack failed on the depth hoar at the ground (ECTP 11). Lots of energetic collapses and cracking on our ascent. The pack is shallow and weak in this area. We made the initial plan to avoid avalanche terrain given knowledge of the poor snowpack structure across the advisory area. Our observations confirmed this.