Southern San Juan

Avalanche

Rowan Morris · Jan 29, 2021 · Southern San Juan

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Weather

A most cloudy, mild temperature day in the mountains with moderate southwest winds on ridge tops moving light amounts of snow onto lee aspects.

Snowpack

The new storm snow has settled and sintered quite a bit. Found moist snow and crusts below about 10,000 feet but a generally soft slab, 1-2 feet thick on all aspects at elevations above that. As we climbed above treeline, N-E-SE aspects had noticeable evidence of wind drifting and slabs were noticeably stiffer and thicker on those slopes.

Avalanche

Everywhere! We observed evidence of almost too many natural avalanches to count. Most occurred on generally east aspects (some NE and SE terrain features) near and above treeline. All of them were D2 or slightly greater, as some likely slid sympathetically and piled up debris in the same places; many were also fairly large relative to the paths and almost all stepped down deeper into weak snow closer to the ground.