Front Range
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Jan 17, 2019 · Front Range
Weather
Sunny skies and calm to light winds on Sunday and Monday. Cold temperatures especially below 10k feet with overnight lows near -10F. On Tuesday clouds increased to overcast with strong westerly winds at ridgetop. Moderate snow transport at ridgetop onto easterly slopes. Calm winds off of ridges. Wednesday continued with cloudy skies and windy conditions. A few snow flurries observed but no measurable snowfall.
Snowpack
The snowpack below treeline is weak and unsupportable on all aspects. Very small loose dry would be the only concern but even that was minor on steep, below treeline slopes. Height of snow below treeline about 90 cm.---Near treeline the snowpack becomes more supportable but the snowpack is still generally weak. Northerly terrain features were cross-loaded by recent Front Range upslope, easterly winds and these features were avoided. Southwest quarter slopes held soft wind-drifted snow. This freshly drifted snow sits on mostly rock and basal facets. Westerly snow was being stripped and moved to easterly slopes on Tuesday when the westerly winds commenced.--- We traveled over the top of the range and into easterly-facing above-treeline basins on Monday (1/14). We saw further evidence of recent upslope easterly winds with some alpine northeast faces with sastrugi. I dug on a north-facing above-treeline slope and found a one meter deep snowpack. Areas around where I dug were up to 2 meters deep from previous wind loading. The snowpack was generally strong but there are still multiple layers of concern. The normal thin faceted layers sandwiched between hard slab was obsereved as well as 4 mm basal depth hoar. No propagating results in an ECT. The snowpack above treeline looks similar to the snowpack in the alpine in other adjacent regions such as Summit Co. Hard to trigger avalanches but potential for wide propagation with hard slabs present. A large loading event or a trigger in a thin spot would be necessary for an avalanche on basal weak layers on this generally hard snowpack. A smaller loading event could result in avalanches on weak layers in the top 30 cm of the snowpack.
Avalanche
No recent avalanche activity observed anywhere in this region.