Front Range
SnowpackIan Fowler · Apr 29, 2023 · Front Range
Weather
100% sunshine. 100% windy. Winds appeared generally westerly and were blowing snow into turbulent suspension.
Snowpack
Below treeline the new snow had frozen hard into a two to three-inch crust. The exception to this was areas where it was shaded, and there was still soft fun skiing. Near treeline the snow began to be wind affected but was generally still soft, with only small pockets of hollow-feeling snow. On a northeasterly aspect at this elevation, there were many crusts but none had facets around them and snowpack tests did not propagate. The dust layer is now an ice layer and is 70cm down in the snowpack. As we traveled above treeline the aspects of wind effect were quite obvious. Northerlies looked quite stripped with just some cross-loaded features. Easterlies were a nice tiger stripe where any slab was being degraded leaving soft snow, and southerlies were fat and bulbous with drifting especially high on slopes beneath ridges. The winds did not look to be effectively loading slopes more, blowing it to Kansas. Although Extended Column Tests on southerlies were scary for windslab, with easy propagation, we did not observe any cracking in the wind-drifted snow, and pressure on slopes did not result in any avalanches. This was a marked contrast to yesterday at Berthoud where slabs were very touchy.