Front Range
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · May 22, 2023 · Front Range
Weather
Clear skies to start the day. Clouds increased to scattered with haze from the Canadian fire also increasing. By our exit at noon, the peaks of the Tenmile Range were obscured by the smoke.
Snowpack
Supportable travel on top of a 10 cm thick melt-freeze crust. We dug on east-facing slopes and found snow depths ranging from 90 to 230 cm. In the 90 cm deep snowpit, the whole snowpack was in different states of melt forms with water draining to the ground. On a north-facing slope at about 13k feet, the top 40 cm of the snowpack had seen meltwater at some point and was pretty well consolidated. Below this depth, we found small-grained, moist rounded grains. These grains had not yet been flooded with meltwater. We did not find evidence of ice bodies deeper than 40 cm from the surface on northeast. Although high northerly slopes have not yet fully transitioned, it is hard to see a big decrease in stability moving forward unless we get a massive heat wave. We have already seen freezing levels rise above this mark and it seems that high northerly slopes can handle a little bit of heat. ---All in all, we found a typical springtime snowpack with no signs of unstable snow. We had planned on exiting early (10ish) but stuck around longer due to the 10 cm thick melt-freeze crust staying intact. Boot pen increased throughout the day from less than 1 cm at 7 AM to 10 cm at 11 AM. Although boot pen increased, ski pen was never more than about 2 to 3 cm deep even close to noon.
Avalanche
Numerous old avalanches on multiple aspects all around Loveland Pass. Too many to count and most of them are likely at least a week old. Most of these loose wet avalanches were in the D1 to D1.5 range with a few isolated larger ones.