Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

Machine Gun Ridge had more than a few small slabs pop out from directly under the cornice, none of the little ones ran far. There was one that ran from cornice nearly to tree line (U-N-R2?-D2-O) maybe could have been a cornice failure. The cornice failure jives with what we had on the West Ridge in Copper Bowl, albeit much smaller, (kind if a similar aspect), Those events have been matching up. Jacque's Peak had some activity on the E side (see attached pictures) some of these are repeat runners the last couple mini storms on what I would guess is the old snow interface. This area is in our permit but we have done very little in the zone this year. So the "not common" stuff is on some of that Jacque's E facing and some of the N facing, no pictures. Lots of little pockets on the N near or just under cornice line with no apparent cornice failure. A lot of "Pop and Lock" but never really seen this stuff do that. There was one release that happened after 1400 on a NE off of Jacque's that was not there earlier. It certainly gets cross loaded and we see it run, but since the wind wasn't hooning I figure it could be cooling related, kinda cool, if I had time I'd go look at it. Our control work results were pretty minimal, extensive crack that didn't drop into old snow on the N half and wind slab/cornice failure isolated to the shot location. One shot in a rarely open Southerly path triggered a D1 wind slab that ran to valley floor, but it did not gouge out all (in fact very little) of the old P/K+ wind deposit that was sitting on top of MF crust. Only in the steeper (>35deg) areas did it all run down to the MF crust. We had some natural cornice failure and one mid path pocket pop out but nothing large, all the mid path stuff falls inline with the higher winds for us.