Front Range
SnowpackAustin DiVesta · Jan 21, 2025 · Front Range
Weather
A brutally cold morning moving towards a pleasant afternoon. We had light and variable winds for most of the day, but ridgetop winds were strong enough to move snow around.
Snowpack
The snowpack was talkative, with lots of collapsing on most slopes that didn’t have tracks on them. You would watch the recent snow fell from the trees as you ride. We dug on a northeast-facing slope around 10,800ft and found a snow height of 120 cm. We saw on top of the December drought layer had some buried Surface Hoar on the very top of this layer. This then propagated across the Extended Column Test with hits from the elbow (ECTP14). I suspect most of the collapsing we experienced throughout the day was on the December Drought Layer. We also dug on a west-facing slope and found a shallower snowpack, only 95cm in total depth. Here, we found that most of the pack was fairly weak, but we did find that December drought layer. We got non-propagating results after 19 taps on that layer. It appears that there just isn’t enough of a slab on top of this layer to communicate the propagation quite yet.