Vail & Summit County

Avalanche

Jason Konigsberg · Dec 6, 2022

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Weather

Overcast. Calm below treeline. Light winds near treeline. Didn’t observe snow transport but visibility was limited. About 8” of new snow that mostly fell on Monday night. No new snow during the day.

Snowpack

Below tree line spans 2600 vertical feet in this area so I’ll break it into upper and lower with upper being the top few hundred feet above about 11k feet. Lower BTL is very thin and it was tough to move around on westerly and south facing slopes. There were small collapses where we found continuous snow but ground hazards were more of an issue than avalanches. I didn't observe northerly-facing slopes at this elevation. Snow depth is 45 to 60 cm. The upper below treeline area above about 11k was much different. The snow depth increased to 110 cm at 11200 ft. Collapses were a few hundred feet wide and booming. The most notable thing I observed was how supportive the snowpack was to skiing and skinning once out of the thin cover. Up until this point this season I have mostly been wallowing in facets and sinking through the slab. The supportive snowpack is probably a function of both the deeper snowpack location and also the recent warming and settlement. The supportive snowpack is not a good thing in the short term. It means that slabs are better connected, the weak layer is slightly harder to effect, and most importantly, avalanches can be much larger than just a few days ago. I dug one snowpit on a north-facing slope at 11,200 feet. The snow height was 110 cm. This is double what I was finding near Fremont Pass a couple days ago. I got an extended column test result of ECTP18 at 30 cm from the ground on 2 mm facets above a very thin rain crust. These results also show that avalanches are getting harder to trigger but any avalanche triggered would be quite large and dangerous.

Avalanche

None observed looking at southeast-facing Pitkin paths but visibility was poor. I walked along the top of some steep northerly-facing start zones and I got collapses but no avalanches.