Front Range
SnowpackChris Cox · Jan 28, 2012 · Snowy Range
Weather
Clear skies, strong westerly winds.
Snowpack
South to south east faces: To thin to ski in a lot of areas. Mostly hard packed wind slab on top of crust and depth hoar. Some localized cracking, but newer snow bonding well to underlying crust. North faces: Deeper snow pack with thick layer of depth hoar. Occasionally during the skinning the thick faceted layer would failed completely and I would drop about a foot. However, the upper layers were not cohesive enough to propagate the failure. In contrast, near the ridges wind packing creates a more rigid layer with widespread whoomping. We ski cut an open slope that was about 30 degrees, but to my surprise it didn't fail. Perhaps, there wasn't enough force from one ski cut to break through the upper layers.