Front Range
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · May 2, 2025 · Front Range
Weather
It was still relatively cool with light winds and clear skies.
Snowpack
Below 12,000 feet, the new snow has already gone through a melt-freeze cycle, and the only dry snow was from light snow that fell on Friday evening and overnight. The snowpack is generally consolidated with hard layers of snow throughout the snowpack. Above this elevation, on northerly-facing slopes, there is about 20 cm of dry snow from the Wednesday/Thursday storm. On the northerly slopes that I traveled, some in the upper 30-degree range, I did not observe any signs of instability in drifted snow, and the new snow was not getting overly wet. I also looked for any shallowly buried faceted layers on northerly slopes, and I did not find anything of concern. On south and southeast-facing slopes, it was easy to trigger small slabs directly below ridgetop. These small avalanches only ran a few feet due to the benign terrain that I was traveling in. The slope steepened as I descended, but there was no drifted snow lower down. Although I was able to push a little bit of wet snow around steep rocky areas, there was not enough volume on top of hard crusts to be an issue. I desceded west and southwest-facing slopes after noon and I found the top inch of snow to be moist to wet. I was able to get this top inch of snow to "sheet off" on buried crusts on terrain features approaching 40 degrees. All of these small wet sluffs quickly arrested after a few feet as the slope angle was not steep enough and sustained.
Avalanche
Several small skier-triggered avalanches on the Summit County side of Loveland Pass. One from Friday and a few from Saturday. It was hard to tell if the avalanches in steep chutes on the north side of Lenawee Mountain were wet or dry.