Grand Mesa

Snowpack

Brandon Levy · Mar 29, 2023 · Grand Mesa

Weather

Warm and windy with broken cloud cover. The temperature was above freezing and the elevated winds made it feel much cooler throughout the monring on Grand Mesa.

Snowpack

The snowpack on Grand Mesa is deep and consistently well over 100" across the terrain. The 3/20 interface is buried between 40 and 50 cms where I looked at 10600'. On a more easterly-facing feature this interface was a crust with small-grained rounding facets underneath. The facets were fairly resistant at four finger on the hand-hardness scale. These combination did not produce propagating results with extended column tests. On a more northerly-facing slope the crust was absent at the 3/20 interface and it was composed of 1mm rounding faceted grains. Extended column tests produced hard, propagating, repeatable results (ECTP 27 x 2 down 40 to 50 cms on 1mm rounding facets)