Vail & Summit County
AvalancheKreston Rohrig · Feb 28, 2020 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Beautiful sunny and warm day. Nice day for traveling above treeline in the 10-Mile, with little to no wind.
Snowpack
Coverage is quite good in most places until you get above treeline. Recent strong winds have been most unkind and have either scoured or heavily wind-loaded upper elevation terrain. The recent giant avalanches in this area tell an interesting story. We dug up near the crown of the massive D3 avalanche off Peak 1's southeast face and found a couple significant layers of concern. The first was a melt/freeze crust buried around 25cm from the surface under the two most recent storms. This layer was super reactive and propagated with only 6 taps in an ECT. More concerning is the weak fist hard layer of 2-3mm facets and depth hoar at the bottom of the snowpack. This weak facet/DH layer is capped by a super hard slab, and is the main failure point in the avalanche from a few days ago. It's hard to say if the intense loading event that caused the avalanche failed at the melt/freeze crust and stepped down to the bottom layer, or if the weak snow at the bottom gave out first. Regardless, this hard slab over weak snow produced an avalanche that crossed multiple terrain features and broke along the entire face.
Avalanche
The two major avalanches off the southeast face of Peak 1 and the east face between Peak 1 and Mount Victoria both took out most the season's snowpack and ran super far down each of their paths.