Front Range
AvalancheAustin DiVesta, Jason Konigsberg · Mar 1, 2022 · Front Range
Weather
Beautiful warm bluebird day with very little wind.
Snowpack
Temperatures were above freezing at 9 am at the parking lot. We noticed a lot of different snow surfaces, from cold snow in shadows behind trees to gloppy snow that sticks to your skins on all slopes. Anywhere slopes have solar input, the snow surface was moist but not wet. Once we got near treeline, you could tell the difference in the snow surface going from moist on east through south to dry on north through east-facing slopes. We dug a snowpit on an east-facing slope at 11700ft and found a snow height of 135cm. The top 10cm was moist enough to form a well-packed snowball. This was sitting on top of a thin melt-freeze crust. The rest of this snowpit consisted of facets varying in 4 Finger to 1 Finger hardness. An Extended Colum Test produced a hard result 15cm from the ground. This snowpit shows that the snowpack structure is still not great, but we lack a consistent slab. The upper snowpack structure with a buried layer of faceted snow, would not be able to handle much of a load. We probed other areas to feel overall snow height and slab thickness. We found very little evidence of a slab and got snow heights varying from less than three feet to six feet deep.--- We moved to south-facing slopes and found about 3-5cm of moist snow at the surface. Water was not moving further down into the snowpack. Melt water was pooling on a shallowly buried crust. Southerly-facing slopes are a mix of crust/facet combinations throughout the snowpack. Wet slabs could be a future issue in isolated terrain such as rocky, steep, southerly-facing slopes with a thin snowpack (less than about 60 cm).
Avalanche
We saw a handful of Loose Wet avalanches in extreme terrain towards Citadel Peak and one slab avalanche in the same area that most likely ran in around the 23/24. Overall, there wasn't much avalanche activity around the EJMT during and following the last storm.