Steamboat & Flat Tops

Snowpack

Austin DiVesta Ian Fowler · Mar 15, 2022 · Steamboat & Flat Tops

Weather

Beautiful Bluebird day with light winds from the west. Tempertures were right around freezing for most of the day. Above treeline in the Zirkel Wilderness we did notice a little bit of snow transport off somee of the higher peaks.

Snowpack

We observed a deep snowpack with many places at least three meters deep on all aspects. Last week’s 30 inches of new snow sits on top of a homogeneous slab made up of 4 Finger to 1 Finger Slabs in the upper 100cm of the snowpack. The fresh snow was starting to become moist, but the light wind was helping keep the snow surface cool. We chose to dig around treeline since we do not have a lot of data from this elevation band in Steamboat. On a north-facing slope, we dug a snowpit and did not find a melt-freeze crust that we have seen in other locations in this pit. We could not get propagation results in the upper meter of the snowpack. On probing around other areas nearby, we were unable to find any sort of crust and what appears to be a consistent hard slab for the bottom two meters of the snowpack. As we wrapped into more of an easterly-facing slope, we started to see a 2-3cm melt-freeze crust. We expected to see weak facets under this curst but found that these facets were beginning to heal and starting to round. We observed no signs of instabilities as we traveled through the terrain today.