Northern San Juan
SnowpackKrista Beyer · Mar 12, 2024 · Northern San Juan
Weather
Day started off sun-burn warm and ended in clouds and a tease of small snowflakes resulting in no observable accumulation. Sustained moderate winds at ridgeline out of the southwest.
Snowpack
CR 2 is reliably the shallowest road-accessed area surrounding Silverton. This year is not an exception. South and west aspects carry the shallowest snowpack depths. The south is largely burned out under 11,000 feet, and dust was readily visible on the surface, encouraging accelerated melt. West aspects maintained a shallow snowpack of 30-50cm with bare ridgelines. Large fist hard 3mm cup-shaped facets could be found on west aspects and skis punched through to the ground in isolated areas (due to faceting as opposed to the punchy conditions at lower elevations caused by warming). North and northeast slopes maintain a white canvas. Snowpack depth across a near treeline slide path ranged from 110cm to 150cm on average. There was evidence of an avalanche that ran earlier in the season. Near ridgeline depths on leeward northeast slopes ranged from 150cm-180cm. Surface conditions remain soft on anything north-facing, but ski penetration is shallow and arrests on the 3/3 dust layer. I dug midpath near treeline on a northeast slope. The purpose of digging was to track the dust layers that have become our near-surface persistent layers. About 8-10cm of pencil-hard layer has formed under dust from the 2/27 and 3/3 events. These pencil-hard layers are sandwiched by 1 finger-hard layers. One hard, sudden planar CT failure (CT26,N,N) was observed just below the 2/27 Pencil layer. This layer seems to be the one associated with most recent avalanche activity. Two moderate CT (CT15,15) failures were observed on a lower layer about 80cm from the surface. No failures were observed on ECTs (ECTX).