Steamboat & Flat Tops
AvalancheAustin DiVesta · Jan 27, 2024 · Steamboat & Flat Tops
Weather
The day started cloudy and gray, but it was a beautiful blue bird day by the afternoon.
Snowpack
A mostly right-side-up snowpack until you get to the January 4th layer, which is now buried anywhere from 1.2 meters down to 1.7 meters deep. This layer will be hard to impact if you find more than 1.5 meters of snow on the ground. However, if you find a snowpack less than that, it would be possible to impact that weak sugar snow. This will be more prevalent on southeast and south-facing slopes where a melt-freeze crust/facet combination has caused a handful of avalanches in the Rabbit Ears Pass zone. The only pit that produced propagating (ECTP18 down 65cm from the surface) results was on a southeast-facing slope around 10,500ft. This failed on a mixture of melt forms and facets that were starting to gain strength but still weaker than the snow that fell in January.
Avalanche
Avalanches on Baker Mountain which looked fresher than the last time it had slide around the 16th of January. A small R1-D1 avalanche off Rabbit Ears Peak likely ran during the January storm at some point.