Front Range
SnowpackIan Fowler · Feb 10, 2025 · Front Range
Weather
It was surprisingly windy and cold.
Snowpack
Below the treeline, about 25cm of settled storm snow was not slabby and was well bonded to the underlying snow. This underlying snow was generally fist hard and made up of facets. Where we observed above treeline, there was a lot of variety in the surface conditions and snow depths. The snow height was generally about 1.5 meters (5 feet) when probing. However, it would vary wildly from 30cm to over 3 meters in some areas without much surface clues to the change. This makes it hard to generalize over the wider terrain from snowpits. Storm snow was well bonded to the surface below but there is a fresh 1 finger to pencil hard slab forming at the surface. The distribution of this slab and thickness was very varied. In some areas, the snow had stripped snow back to a shiny hard-to-skin on melt freeze/wind-buffed surface, and in others, there was a 5 to 15cm (3-5 inch) thick slab at the surface. If you trigger an avalanche at the surface, there is a chance it will step down to a layer of facets buried about 40cm below the surface. Mid-pack slabs seemed really thick and strong, and it is hard to imagine an avalanche stepping down to the ground, but with so much variability in depths and snow distribution, I wouldn't totally rule it out.