Southern San Juan
AvalancheAnonymous · Mar 31, 2020 · Southern San Juan
Weather
It certainly felt like April was knocking on the door today, as warm, spring weather was in full effect. Mild, fairly warm temps all day with nothing but sunshine. Winds were generally calm below treeline, becoming light with a few moderate, SW gusts near and above.
Snowpack
After departing from La Plata Canyon road, we travelled on generally southerly slopes below treeline that had a quickly warming and moistening surface crust. The surface continued to warm and was generally moist for the rest of the day while traveling on east and northeast slopes near treeline and south below. Otherwise, on the east and north east slopes we skied we still found the stronger slab of march snow overlying weaker, faceted snow from February, with the top 4 or 5 cm of that slab being very moist.
Avalanche
There was no shortage of wet loose activity on solar aspects in the La Platas today as sunshine was unobstructed and strong. Essentially the entire S and E facing basin below Burwell, Spiller, and the Babcocks was covered in roller balls and some larger wet slides. The numerous small, wet loose slides off the SE face of Spiller and the S face below the knife ridge combined with one that ran down the S facing couloir just west of Babcock's SW summit to create a fairly large debris pile. The largest and most dangerous slides we observed, however, came off of the SSE face of East Bab. After funneling into the cliffs and chutes just above where the Boren creek road crosses to the mine, the slides had gouged deep, entrained quite a bit of snow, and ran well beyond where the slope angle eases. All three of the slides in this area were at least D2 with one perhaps getting closer to D3, and all originated below the cliffs near the summit of East Babcock and ran onto the apron across Boren creek road.