Northern San Juan
SnowpackChris Dickson · Feb 27, 2025 · Northern San Juan
Weather
Cloudless blue skies with light winds and temperatures in the 20s to mid-30s.
Snowpack
The structure of a thick cohesive slab of newer snow on top of older weak layers is fairly widespread across the mountains, especially below treeline. But the sensitivity of this setup also seems to be slowly decreasing. Tests results in pits at all elevation bands on north-facing slopes were fairly uninteresting, with a smattering of ECTXs. The spots where you could trigger a dangerous Persistent Slab avalanche are still out there, but they may be becoming harder to find. From a big picture perspective, our snowpack on north-facing slopes still looks very immature, as it would in December on an average snow year. But on south-facing slopes, the Spring transition is underway. I dug on a lower-elevation sunny slope that was 60cm deep and meltwater had fully percolated down to the bottom of the snowpack. The snowpack was pencil-hard from top to bottom and comprised of melt-forms. Thus, we enter the transition time, and "The Tale of Two Snowpacks", with a slope's orientation towards the sun driving a major difference in the characteristics of the snowpack. That said, it's not Spring yet, and higher elevation sunny slopes likely still feature cold snow under an ever-growing surface crust, which is where we are most concerned about wet slabs in the near future.