Front Range
SnowpackJordan Scheremeta · May 3, 2011 · Front Range
Weather
partly cloudy ~30 degrees
Snowpack
Me and a friend skied off the ridge between 13010 and Mount Hagar yesterday. We went out the gate off chair 8 at Loveland at around 3:30pm. We dug a ~1.5m deep pit at approximately 12,600' on an east facing slope about 25 degrees. There is definitely still well defined layering and there were no signs of a spring snowpack. A compression test revealed 2 layers of concern. The top layer was a soft slab approximately 30 cm deep. It failed after 6 taps from the wrist on a clean shear plane. A ~10 cm hard slab was below and failed after 10 blows from the wrist and 4 blows from the elbow, but the break was not as clean. Below that, we could get nothing else to react. We decided to ski lower angle terrain off the ridge line than we originally planned, knowing that the top soft slab had potential to slide. Nothing did go when we were skiing.