Vail & Summit County
SnowpackJason Konigsberg · Dec 1, 2025 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
No wind transport. Mostly clear and calm. On my drive back to Leadville, it looked like northerly winds had picked up with the high peaks of the Sawatch in a cloud of blowing snow. It looked like more sublimation than effective transport.
Snowpack
The snowpack is simple, where a snowpack exists. In sheltered northerly areas, there is 15 cm of faceted snow under 15 cm of recent snow that has not yet faceted. The entire "snowpack" is fist-hard and soft, and any sort of travel is essentially walking on the ground. In drifted northerly areas near ridgetop, I observed shooting cracks and small collapses, and one loud rumbling collapse. Although I observed obvious signs of instability, there are few areas where you can find this unstable snow. You need to find a slab that is at least as wide as the terrain feature, and drifted snow that is cohesive and at least one-finger hard. These areas have expanded in the last week, but are still isolated in the terrain, and 100 feet wide across a terrain feature. In a downslope direction, the slab only exists for about 50 feet, before I skied off of the slab and into a soft, thin snowpack. East-facing drifted areas are much shallower with thinner basal weak layers.