Gunnison

Snowpack

Brian Lazar · Mar 12, 2015 · Gunnison

Weather

Warm, mostly cloudy, calm. Temperatures reached into the upper 30s.

Snowpack

Snow surface had crusts on all but north aspects. They softened by the afternoon, and became moist by 2pm or so. Spent the day in N and NE facing terrain BTL. HS ranges from 120cm to 145cm. Snowpack had slabs 4F in hardness in upper 40cm of the snowpack from recent storm snow settling. The mid pack had thin layers of facets, sandwiched between some thin stiffer (1F) slab, all resting on 50-60cm of F hard depth hoar which is showing some signs of rounding. Dug 3 profiles and a separate Rutchblock, all in close proximity. ECTs produced hard results, with propagation, on two separate interfaces; mid pack facets and the depth hoar. PSTs all produced results 35-50/100 down ~80cm to the END. Rutchblock failed on mid-pack facets, score of 4, partial block. The slope on which we were doing profiles had a large rumbling collapse around 200 feet across.