Gunnison
AvalancheCrested Butte Avalanche Center · Nov 19, 2014 · Gunnison
Weather
Wx was bluebird and warm in the sunshine. No wind to speak of, though it looks like this weekend's storm blew things around quite a bit up there.
Snowpack
Toured up the Slate drainage today. Snowpack was thin on the skin up, 15" to 18" guesstimate. The entire route up was in the sun. Snowpack at top of the skin track was much deeper, but definitely had some wind deposit. At the bottom of our runs, snow depth was 115cm in the shade.
Avalanche
Avy: We skied two runs on the same slope, an E/NE aspect, up to mid-30 degrees, with a few convex rolls. We had no cracking, collapsing or movement on our tour with one small, pretty quiet and localized whumph setting a new skin track. More interestingly, we saw a ton of old natural activity in this area on treed aspects that were more due north. One treed wall was littered with natural crowns ranging from what looked like 6" to up to 12-15" - lots and lots of smaller pockets, with some probably 75ish ft wide. These did not run to the ground and they were across a gully, so we didn't look to see what they ran on. Another due north treed slope had run with what looked like the entire last weekend's storm snow - crown looked up to 2ft deep, with debris funneling into a very pronounced gully. Around the corner from the pronounced slide off of Purple Ridge was what looked like another crown, bigger in size even, but the dimensions (and even the crown) were not clear because of what looks like heavy winds in the area.