Northern San Juan

Avalanche

Bill Nalli Ann Mellick · Apr 13, 2020 · Northern San Juan

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Weather

Cold and crisp for April. Moderate to strong wind in the alpine.

Snowpack

New wind drifted snow has settled to 1 to 4 inches in areas travelled. Bonded well to old surface and not sensitive. Snow below that has refrozen very solid and essentially locked up the wet avalanche problems. There are still Fist hard poly grains below the refrozen snow but the crust is so solid that no instability was observed. Just for the heck of it I performed some CT and ECT's to see what happens if you isolate the solid crust. CT 15 and ECTP 21 indicate that if the strength of the crust was to break down again instability increases. But, it would take another massive warm up and currently this seems very unlikely in the near future.

Avalanche

Another loose-wet gouging avalanche from the recent warm up.