Steamboat & Flat Tops
SnowpackJason Konigsberg, Mike Cooperstein · Feb 8, 2017 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
There was not much snow being transported today as most of the available snow was redistributed with strong winds Tuesday night. It was hard to tell how much new snow fell as sheltered areas were minimal. There was also a lot of graupel on and near the surface which would account for a lot of the snow-water-equivalent measured at local SNOTEL sites.Cloud cover today was overcast with sky cover beginning to decrease in the afternoon.
Snowpack
No significant cracking or collapsing was observed...Surface snow was mostly graupel with intermittent wind crusts and older crusts exposed on westerly slopes...There is a few storm snow instabilities in the upper snowpack but none of which showed to propagate a fracture and any instabilty was relatively shallow with little slab above...We observed some wind-loaded slopes with slabs of wind-drifted snow up to 3 feet thick. These slabs were isolated to ridgetops. We did not observe many easterly slopes where the majority of wind loading would have occurred...The buried surface hoar layer that formed around January 19th was visibile in every northerly-facing snowpit that we dug. In some snowpits the layer was thin and the surface hoar was laying down due to the slope having previously collapsed and avalanched. On an undisturbed slope north-facing slope we found a 1-2cm thick surface hoar layer buried 2 feet deep. This layer propagated a fracture on 22 taps in an extended-column test. The fracture character was sudden planar with the slab shooting off of the column on 22 taps in two tests.