Northern San Juan

Snowpack

We traveled East through south through west to north aspects today. East to south had two melt freeze crusts in the upper 30 cm of the snowpack. The snowpack below these crusts was moist. Below these crusts the old depth hoar was rounding and moist. Basically no structure left to it. Varied in depth by aspect, 12" to many feet deep. The crust was falling apart by 11:30 am. As we moved around to more west the MF crust was impenetrable at noon. It quickly began to fall apart by 2 pm. Impressive how fast the crust went from difficult to penetrate to near unsupportable. I would not want to be on west aspects after say 3 or 4 pm at the very latest. 1 to 2 pm is probably the better time frame to be off. Slight variations in aspect made a difference in support. Quite tricky