Northern San Juan

Snowpack

A general observation from the perspective of the highway. I haven't had time to get into the field, but have had plenty of obs from the road. Incredible strain on the snowpack currently from the warm-up and increased creep. The upper pack is sitting on the saturated, rained on surface from below the last storm snow and there are very visible signs of widespread collapses on steep rolls throughout the top of RMP zone. One area in upper-upper commodore looks like a large collapse/creep-glide crack that opened and then got a little snow on top of it. Saw from a distance through binos, but looked impressive and scary. Water runnels are all over the place, but i don't think the drainage is going too much below the old dust, but I could be wrong on that. Quite a few bigger alpine lines have been skied with no avalanches, so high alpine terrain may be a bit better as the dust layer either never experienced the rain event, or it re-froze before this cycle. TL and below, I believe, the saturated rain layer got insulated and has never frozen and that is the failure layer in most of the slide that I've seen and most likely in all of the collapses you can see from the road.