Gunnison

Snowpack

A friend and I were skiing the north-facing side of Snodgrass, we skipped over onto a short, small more northeast-facing slope. He kicked off a sluff that slowly propagated into a wet slide. It had about a 6 inch crown, ran about 75 meter, and was around 20 meters across. The deposition pile was about 3-4 feet deep. The slide was just the layer of new snow running on the hard base underneath. We had skied similar aspects up higher which were actually soft and powdery. But by the time we got down here the temperature had warmed up quickly and made the snow quite heavy. The temperature change occurred in the space of about 500 vertical feet and no more than 15 minutes but it was drastic. The slide was kicked off around 10:25 am.