Vail & Summit County
AvalancheBrian Lazar · Jan 9, 2023 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Snowy on Friday January 6 with around 6 inches of new snow by Saturday morning. Saturday was cool and mostly cloudy with S-1 on and off throughout the day and may another inch of total accumulation. Sunday morning started partly cloudy and then gave way to mostly sunny skies by late morning. Westerly winds picked up on Sunday and started to drift snow.
Snowpack
The snowpack in this area does not inspire much confidence. The alpine terrain is heavily wind affected. Most west-facing slopes are scoured to patchy thin coverage with little avalanche hazard. Easterly-facing terrain, and gully features have isolated rock hard slabs plastered in between bare ground. The near treeline elevation is most dangerous. Snowpack here is most continuous with average snowpack depth around 150cm. The snowpack consists of hard slabs interspersed with three weak layers of concern buried 1.5 to 3 feet deep. We experienced a few rumbling collapses traveling on west, northwest, and north-facing terrain over the course of a couple days. The size of the collapses (shaking trees a hundred feet away) suggest the failing weak layer in the November dry-spell layer around 3 feet deep. However, the current structure is conducive to getting the upper weak layers to fail under the weight of a person and then stepping into deeper weak layers. We could then see 3-foot thick hard slabs breaking hundreds of feet wide. Below treeline the slabs are much softer, where they exist, and not capable of producing more than D2 size avalanches in most places.
Avalanche
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