Sawatch

Avalanche

Anonymous · Mar 8, 2014 · Sawatch

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Weather

Overnight low of ~11F at St Elmo weather station. Rapid ambient temp warming from 20F at 9am to 45F at 1pm. Few early high thin clouds that moved away east for clear bluebird day. Tropical out at lunch at treeline.

Snowpack

Rapidly consolidating on N, NE, E, SE, S aspects BTL; new snow of Friday 3/7 night bonded well to existing surface; observed few roller ball and small D0.5 point-release wet slides that didn't step below new storm snow and that all occurred during warm sunshine of Sat. 3/8. Buried weak layer (deep persistent slab) BTL is getting flattened the past few days. At TL and above, hardly any wind effect from this storm, nor cornice breakage. Maybe a dozen small wet solar-radiation point releases in entire Baldwin Lake amphitheater.

Avalanche

These were about a dozen natural point-release wet slides that all occurred within the Friday night storm snow layer, and all likely related to Saturday's warm day temps. They all occurred BTL, TL, ATL and on E/SE/S/SW aspects