Gunnison
AvalancheEric Murrow · Feb 17, 2025 · Gunnison
Weather
Mostly cloudy skies with close to an inch of snow in the afternoon. Winds remained light, with very little transport below treeline. Brief visibility showed frequent drifting from westerly winds at upper elevations. cloud cover: overcast; wind loading: moderate; snow avail for transport: large amounts
Snowpack
We moved through east and northeast terrain below treeline near Pittsburg. Slab depth from the Cupid Crusher storm generally ranged from 90 to 110 cm thick (3 feet). Easterly tiled slopes, the slab was a bit thinner and up to 1 finger hard at the bottom, and more northerly tilted slopes showed over a meter with up to 4 finger slab. The easterly slopes up through 10,500 often had a 3-6cm melt/freeze crust with some ice columns and lenses' on the sunnier side of east, whereas the shadier northeast slopes had no crust or thin, soft crusts below the storm snow (see test profile images). More easterly slopes at this elevation looked less troublesome than northeast. The weak layer on northeast slopes remains fist hard, 1-2mm facets. There were signs of rounding on these grains, but the overall weakness creates an ugly, scary structure. We didn't experience any collapsing or cracking while moving through the terrain, and ECT's didn't produce propagating results. However, the structure on shady slopes where the 3 foot slab sits on facets or thin crusts capping facets makes me nervous, and I have no motivation to test the waters with this structure on consequential terrain. Tests produced ECTN results in the middle of the slab on a graupel layer. This layer could produce an avalanche where additional wind loading stiffens the slab above, but it looks to have run its course for the time being in sheltered areas. Eerily quiet on sheltered, shady aspects with poor structure.
Avalanche
Flat light limited avalanche obs through the corridor. I have documented avalanches where crowns were visible, but many slides ran early in the storm cycle and are now obscured by later snowfall. Each Climax Chute had some amount of debris in the runout, but crowns were hard to see on most features. Schuylkill Ridge showed lots of texture and lumps, but debris in aprons was surprisingly hard to see with the exception of the D3 in Thanksgiving Bowl (previously documented) due to snapped trees in the debris. Several avalanches ran early in the storm on southwest aspects and impacted the Slate River Road, but the slopes were small.