Generally stable snow in Beehive W Aspects

We toured into Beehive for day 2 of our AAI pro 1 avalanche course. We decided to tour up the ridge between “Going Home” and “Tyler’s Run”. We dug three pits as a group on a W aspect at 8700 feet and found generally stable results with no prolongation observed in any of the three pits. We did find a layer of buried surface hoar approximately 37cm below the surface, but evidence that the surface hoar has begun to break down, sinter, and gain strength. We found approximately 10-12in of new snow at elevations above 8,000 ft, which was more than we were expecting. Light snow continued throughout the day with 2-4 inches of accumulation by 2 PM when we returned to our car. We observed light wind transport at the ridge line, but did not find any wind affected snow on the W aspect that we toured up.