Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

Austin DiVesta · Mar 22, 2022 · Vail & Summit County

Weather

Temperatures were below freezing for the entire day. Before 11am the winds were calm to light then became moderate from the north. Transporting the new snow into southern start zones. Clouds were broken from most of the day.

Snowpack

I traveled from west to north to east-facing slopes today around Bald Mountain. I found two to four inches of new snow that fell overnight in most places. The fresh snow did not entirely cover old tracks below treeline. As I moved towards upper elevations, winds moved a little bit more snow around, but in wind-sheltered areas near treeline, you could still see old tracks. Winds were predominantly out of the north, which looked like it caused unusual loading in this area. The new snow and wind did not create enough of a slab to change the danger throughout the day. I did notice small localized cracking underfoot on more northwest through north-facing slopes. I had one small audible collapse within the new snow. This makes sense because the snow height on these upper elevation slopes varied from two meters in wind-drifted areas to 50cm in the more open parts of the slope. Regardless of the height of snow, large basal depth hoar still exists at the bottom of the snowpack. On all aspects and elevations that I traveled on today, I found a crust layer ranging in depth and stiffness. Northwest and north did not have a stiff crust, but it was still there. While on an east slope, there are at least two significant crusts in the upper meter of the snow. The east-facing slope I looked at today was wind-loaded and had a height of three meters. Still, in the top meter, there was a one-finger hard crust down 40cm probably formed during last week’s warm-up and then another melt-freeze crust from early march down 55cm that is knife hard