Vail & Summit County
AvalancheKreston Rohrig · Jan 1, 2021 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Blue skies to start with increasing clouds throughout the day. It was nice to be on the east side of the 10-Mile with little to no wind.
Snowpack
Below treeline the snowpack remains thin and weak. Off the ski track, the little bit of remaining slab would barely support my weight and would constantly fail on descent. I had many small collapses on the way back down in terrain that was more open. The snowpack is only around 50cm (2'), so any avalanche would have been small. Near treeline the snowpack thickens and the mid-pack slab was considerably more dense. The basic structure is around 20cm of recent soft snow, over a 40cm 4 finger to pencil hard mid-pack slab, over around 40cm of weak fist hard facets. For the most part, this structure lives in a lot of areas on north to east-facing slopes. Stability tests were a mixed bag, but showed that it took decent force to get a failure to propagate (ECTP21). The good news is, the slab/weak layer combo at this elevation is getting harder to trigger. The bad news is, the volume in the snowpack is greater and likely bury you or worse. This is still a spooky snowpack that demands conservative decisions.
Avalanche
None observed