Sawatch

Avalanche

Ben Pritchett and Will Barrett · Feb 26, 2026 · Sawatch

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Weather

Gusty westerly winds with partly cloudy skies and warm temps.

Snowpack

We mostly travelled on ridgelines above steep terrain and got a few rumbling collapses as we bumped into shallow trigger points. While cracks propagated across some adjacent start zones, to our surprise, none of the paths below us avalanched. We chose to avoid travel in these wind-drifted start zones. The slabs in the drifted areas were generally 2 to 4 feet thick and could easily produce D2 avalanches if you found the wrong spot. In wind-drifted spots below treeline a thin, dense, fledgling slab caps a mostly weak and faceted snowpack. Here might be able to trigger a small slab avalanche on a steep open slope. Now that a thin slab exists in sheltered areas, any future loading will make it easy to trigger avalanches in many places.

Avalanche

We saw one old avalanche on the East bowl of Mt. Peck.