Vail & Summit County

Avalanche

I went to check out the two recent (previously reported) avalanches west of Uneva Peak. These avalanches were observed on Feb 27. The day that they were observed the light was flat so it was hard for the observer to see that there were tracks in the area. It looks like a rider triggered the looker's right avalanche. There were tracks near the top of the crown and tracks coming out of the avalanche lower down on the bed surface. There were also several tracks between the two avalanches. It is hard to tell exactly what happened but my guess would be the first avalanche was rider-triggered and the second avalanche ran sympathetically. The two avalanches look the same age but it is impossible to know for sure. Both avalanches were large, with the looker's left avalanche, the more south-facing one, piling up debris estimated at 20 feet deep. The amount of debris was impressive from an avalanche that only ran about 300 to 400 vertical feet. I went up to the crown of this avalanche and found the crown height to average about 5 to 6 feet. The crown height was fairly consistent across the avalanche. Digging at the crown, I found hard layers of wind-drifted snow stacked on harder layers of wind-drifted snow. This was on top of about 70 cm of faceted snow grains to the ground. The softest layer, and where the avalanche broke was one-finger-minus in hardness and was 50 cm from the ground. The snow height in this area is about 240 cm. It looked thinner where the looker's right, more southwest-facing avalanche ran.