Sawatch
SnowpackAndrew McWilliams · Feb 25, 2023 · Sawatch
Weather
Light snowfall with overcast skies and moderate winds from the southwest. Snowfall amounted to a trace by noon and visibility was improving, but the skies remained completely covered. Temperatures were in the teens.
Snowpack
Touring up from the highway, the snowpack was variable in the trees. In some places, the snow was soft but supportable with 10-20cm of ski penetration. In others, I sank into faceted, structureless snow. In still others, there were stiff, dense wind deposits where ski penetration was 5cm or less. As I ascended towards treeline there were fewer areas that were unsupportable and more areas with dense, wind-affected snow. Above treeline, the wind had scoured any leeward aspects back to the old bed surface or the ground (eg. westerlies above treeline). The wind was moving some snow, but loading was light and most fetches were scoured. In leeward areas and catchments, the snow was blown into drifts pencil to knife hard on the Hand Hardness Scale. In some areas, there was a thin layer of four-finger snow on the surface. Digging into the snowpack revealed a series of stiffer wind-affected layers with softer faceted or decomposing snow in between. Where I dug on east and northwest-facing slopes, the midpack slab was rounding and gaining strength and one-finger to four-finger hard. In Extended Column Tests, I got no results at the depth hoar/slab interface. In the upper wind-affected layers, Extended Column Tests yielded easy to moderate propagating results in faceted snow at the interface with slab and in softer decomposing layers sandwiched between harder layers closer to the surface. Visibility was poor, but I did not notice any signs of recent avalanche activity. There was no cracking or collapsing and I got no results on a couple of small loaded test slopes.