Vail & Summit County
SnowpackJason Konigsberg, Ethan Greene · Dec 18, 2022 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Mostly clear with a few high clouds. Temperatures stayed cool with light breezes at ridgetop.
Snowpack
We stayed mostly on groomed roads. When we wandered off trail, we did not observe any cracking or collapsing.---Below treeline on the way to Ptarmigan Pass we dug on east and southeast-facing slopes below treeline and below 11k feet. On both of these aspects the snowpack was about two feet deep (60 cm) and soft throughout. The snowpack is mostly faceted without much of a cohesive slab, although we did get a result of ECTP11 in extended column test at the top of the basal facets. Surface hoar was also observed on the surface on easterly and southerly slopes. A southeast-facing slope near treeline had a snow height of 80 cm and the slab was much more cohesive. We got an extended column test result of ETP21 on large-grained facets below a thin melt-freeze crust about 30 cm from the ground. We found a similar snowpack with the same test results on an east-facing slope at 11,300 ft. On a due-south facing slope near treeline there was only a foot of snow. There was a faceted layer above a melt-freeze crust near the ground but there was no slab above that and the snowpack was too thin for avalanches.---What we found around Vail Pass today was similar to my observations from Gore Creek on Saturday. Limited cracking and collapsing and hard test results in extended column tests. Low elevations are faceting and the most likely elevation to trigger an avalanche is the upper end of below treeline and higher. This is where we found a one-finger hard slab over a crust-facet-crust sandwich on east and southeast-facing slopes. Although avalanches are getting harder to trigger, and there are fewer obvious signs of unstable snow, the snowpack structure is poor and at elevations mentioned, the slab is connected which means large and wide avalanche remain possible to trigger.