Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

I've been touring the last two weeks intensively around the Eisenhower Loveland Pass area. In short, Eastside avail zone and front range stone around the Loveland Pass Montezuma area have the same snow structure and structural weaknesses as seen in crested Butte in Aspen, except doing slab as of yesterday was not stout enough to produce anything. Tests did not produce any results and neither did slope tests and ski cuts. On solar aspects there are several crust in the upper snowpack, the one near below the surface (found it up to 25cm down) is very supportive (P) especially the steeper the slope. There is a 1.5" faceted F layer on top of that, above that a 1-5" wind compacted F soft slab, atop that a very soft (F) almost uncohesive new and wind drifted snow. This is a widespread upper spx structure ESE-W ATL to about 10,000ft. On E-N these crust are present on all but the coldest aspects up to near-above TL, but very thin and at times "rotten". Here the weakness seems to be a couple of buried n-sfc/sfc-h layers by now at least 2ft down but in this area very isolated. Overall, all of my tests and other field obs (traveled all aspects 10,000-12,5000ft have produced no or resistant results with the exception of a 1day mini Avy cycle on Sat/Sun when I observed many very shallow soft wind slabs ATL/TL on N-E in that are (none greater than R2.5-3D1.5-2).