Front Range
AvalancheDustin Dyer · Jan 2, 2022 · Front Range
Weather
Moderate winds from the NW. lots of blowing snow. Temps in the hi teens. Obscured skies. We mostly toured on easterlies, NTL and BTL.
Snowpack
Super wind affected. Lots of new snow. Was probably soft pow yesterday and is rapidly stiffening into a large wind slab. Will probably turn to wind board in the next day or two but was shockingly reactive today. Whumphing and cracking were widespread and even keeping our terrain in the mid to low 20s didn’t make one feel too safe.
Avalanche
We observed 3 natural wind slab avalanches. All were D1 but 2 were slides I have never seen before (B1 and camel backs). The windows bowl, the camel backs, and what I think is called B1 all slid, crowns were 2-3’ on all three. The B1 slide was about 200’ wide but due to the low angle nature of the area only ran 20-100’. The Camel Backs was only about 30’ wide but debris rad a hundred or so feet. We didn’t get too close to the windows, but it looked the biggest, probably about 200’ wide and ran 200-400’.