Steamboat & Flat Tops

Avalanche

Kreston Rohrig · Jan 4, 2020 · Steamboat & Flat Tops

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Weather

Nice day with high thin clouds and plenty of filtered sunshine. Barely a whisper of wind in the air.

Snowpack

We dug on multiple slopes. Southeast-facing terrain off of Soda Mt was the most stable snow we found. Pretty uniform and right-side up. Pencil hard near the bottom moving up to 50cm of fist hard recent snow near the top. There was a subtle crust below the new storm snow but it was soft and well-bonded. ECTX was all we got in stability tests. Northerly facing slopes are a different story. The snowpack is deep (160-200cm average) but buried surface hoar layers are abundant and reactive. The most consistent and scary sits 50-60cm from the surface and was up to 1 cm thick in some places. ECTP scores ranged from 13 to 21. Multiple large collapses were observed on north facing slopes from our group and were reported from the guide groups as well.

Avalanche

None observed.