Sawatch
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Feb 4, 2019 · Sawatch
Weather
Felt cold with the wind even with temperatures in the upper-twenties. Very windy but not a lot of snow moving around.
Snowpack
A variety of snow surfaces due to strong winds. Faceted surfaces in sheltered areas and hard wind-packed snow surfaces in other areas with crusts on sunny aspects. There has only been a trace of snow in Leadville with this last "storm" and it doesn't look like the Fremont area got much more. With minimal new snow the result was minimal wind loading.---I dug on an east-facing near-treeline slope and found a snowpack depth of 100 cm. The top 40 cm is settled snow from the series of storms in January. This snow is faceting and although supportable to skis, losing cohesion overall. The weakest layer is directly below this slab and it is composed of fist-hard 1-2 mm facets. Below the layer of concern is mostly depth hoar with 4-6 mm grains near the ground. No propagating results in Extended Column tests. Also no cracking and/or collapsing was observed.
Avalanche
Saw a couple avalanches off of Chicago Ridge that I don't believe were previously reported. Dated them as occurring 1/29 but a really rough estimate. One avalanche was reasonably wide but only 100 to 200 vertical.