Vail & Summit County
SnowpackScott Toepfer · May 15, 2011 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
1/2 inch new over nite at my house. Partly cloudy, some building cumulus as I took off at 9:30 this morning. Along the Continental Divide at noon clouds were trying to spill over from the east. Looks like upslope over that way. Quite pretty. After a low of 24 degrees the temps rose rapidly. By noon it was hot.
Snowpack
No signs of fresh activity in the Tenmile east side. Still see last weeks deeper slabs and cornice drops clearly. Not a good freeze last night, even though it got to 24 degrees last night. I was on very skinny skis, so had some problems with breaking thru near surface crust. At noon at 11,400 feet the upper foot of the snowpack had lost support capabilities. Easy to drop in around a foot deep. Especially with my skinny things on. Probably fine with today's modern fat buggers. If I could stay on a packed track I was ok. Upper snowpack....There was an upper crust, not thick, with about a foot of clustered rounded grains (MFcl) below that. No structure at all, wet. Below that the snowpack seemed fairly good, but I did not dig deeper. Some people at Francies had skied east face Crystal Peak (13,8++) on Saturday and reported if you skied near rocks it was pretty punchy. Well out in the middle the surface was very solid and provided corn skiing.