Vail & Summit County

Avalanche

Jason Konigsberg, Dylan Craaybeek · Mar 26, 2024 · Sawatch

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Observation photo 1Observation photo 2Observation photo 3

Weather

Obscured skies with intermittent snow squalls. It felt like January at times. I don't think there was any accumulation during our time in the field. Winds were gusty during the squalls. There were also periods of calm conditions and filtered sun. When the sun was out, it felt like late March.

Snowpack

On a northeast near treeline slope, we found a snowpack 280 cm deep. The early March dust layer is buried 80 cm deep. There was no faceting around this layer in this snowpit. The early February layer was over a meter deep. We did not dig beyond the pencil-hard slab above the February layer to test it. In the upper snowpack, 32 cm of recent snow sits over a weak layer of near-surface facets. In this snowpit, the new snow was very soft and we did not get propagating results on our new persistent weak layer. Test results were ECTN9 and PST31/100 (Arr). We traveled a few hundred feet around the corner to a due north-facing slope and started getting small shooting cracks in the drifted snow. We got a result of ECTP11 in an extended column test at about 30 cm from the surface on the above-mentioned weak layer.--- On a southeast-facing near treeline slope the snowpack is generally under 2 meters deep but there are numerous thick crusts in the snowpack. The uppermost thick crust is beneath the new snow. The new snow is "baking down" with intermittent sun even with the cold temperatures. HST on south-facing slopes is 6 to 8 inches. Southeast-facing slopes are receiving the most drifted snow from the northwest winds. We couldn't find a suitable exposed slope to test the drifted snow but from smaller slopes, it did not seem the drifted snow was reactive (low confidence in this assessment).

Avalanche

Triggered a couple of loose dry avalanches in steep terrain pushing 1.5 in size. We also intentionally triggered a couple of small wind slabs at ridgetop. The slabs were very small. As they broke they ran as loose dry entraining the new snow.