Vail & Summit County
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Jan 25, 2025 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Windy and relatively mild. Everything feels mild after the cold snap. Southwest winds were drifting snow at ridgetop.
Snowpack
Southwest winds were drifting snow into reactive slabs near ridgetop on northeast-facing slopes. I got long-running shooting cracks, and I was able to trigger very small avalanches breaking in the drifted snow. At the end of the day, I traveled across the same slopes where I got shooting cracks in the morning, and signs of instability had already decreased. I observed two recent natural avalanches out of steep, rocky, northeast-facing terrain. It looked like these avalanches broke only in the drifted snow and didn't step down to deeper weak layers. It's hard to say for sure. Out of wind-drifted terrain, the snowpack is quiet, with about 8 inches of new resting on a mostly faceted snowpack. The remnants of the slab that formed from the holiday storms is still one-finger hard, but it is composed of faceted crystals. This faceted slab is unlikely to bend and communicate a fracture in weaker layers beneath. The weak layers are also unremarkable. I could feel softer snow where the faceted snow was buried on December 9th, but this interface doesn't stand out, and the bottom of the snowpack is now a conglomerate of weak, faceted crystals. In my only propagating Extended Column Test of the day (result of ECTP27), the propagating crack was in the depth hoar 20 cm from the ground and not the layer (50 cm from the ground) buried in December. The new weak layer buried on January 18th is something to watch. The worst setup is on southeast-facing slopes where there is a brittle melt-freeze crust with very weak faceted snow beneath. As mentioned above, there is not much of a slab on top yet in most places, but I would be wary of slopes recently loaded by the west and then southwest winds.
Avalanche
Two recent avalanches in steep and rocky terrain. This observation also includes an avalanche spotted on "Half Dome" from Copper on January 24.