Front Range
AvalancheJason Konigsberg, Mike Cooperstein · Nov 18, 2022 · Front Range
Weather
Cold with obscured skies and the sun poking out at times. Slight breeze with minimal wind loading observed.
Snowpack
Below treeline the snowpack is shallow and mostly faceted with a hard crust near the ground. Snow depths ranged from 20 to 40 cm. It's difficult to move with skis below treeline.---Near treeline the snowpack increased to about 45 to 55 cm. Wind drifts were up to a meter deep but they didn't encompass a large area. In one spot where we dug we found 95 cm and then just 20 feet over on the slope, the snow depth was about 40 cm. In this snowpit we got a propating results after nine taps in an Extended Column Test. The failure layer was a softer layer of decomposing fragments sandwiched between much harder layers of wind packed rounds. This layer was about 30 cm from the surface. The drifted snow was likely from when the winds increased on Wednesday. After removing the top portion of the slab we were able to get propagating results in the basal facets after many hits of the block. Basically, where the wind drifts are deep, the basal facets are stronger and harder to affect. But...with many shallow areas, it would be easy to initiate a crack in the basal layer while traveling next to a slope with drifted snow. These shallow areas have an extremely poor setup very weak snow. This weak, faceted snow is above and below a crust near the ground on easterlies. There is no slab yet in none-drifted areas, but when we get one...watch out.
Avalanche
None observe but visibility along ridgetop on the drive was somewhat obscured