Southern San Juan
SnowpackChris Bilbrey · Feb 17, 2021 · Southern San Juan
Weather
Sunny skies to start the day. Clouds started moving overhead around 11 am and light snowfall (S-1) started around 11:30. Snowfall intensity increased (S2+) around 1 pm and lasted till around 3 pm. New snow accumulations of around 2 inches fell during this two hour period. Westerly winds were generally light along ridge top at treeline.
Snowpack
We traveled on north, east, and southeast aspects below treeline. This area has benefited from consistent snowfall over the past month. Snow depths below treeline on many aspects in this area are north of 1.5 meters. Weak layers of concern from earlier in the season have progressively gotten deeper and were mostly unreactive in our snowpits. Multiple melt-freeze crust were observed within the snowpack on southerly-facing slopes. These firm layers could awaken with a big warmup or as the upper slab stiffens. We did observe one propagating ECT results in a layer of 2 to 3 mm facets below a crust, but it took 30 taps to fail under a meter thick slab. On the north side of the compass, buried weak layers were unreactive in ECTs and CTs produced progressive compression and dirty failures in storm layers and no results at the 1/19 interface.