Gunnison

Avalanche

Ben Pritchett · Mar 31, 2023 · Gunnison

Weather

Ground blizzard conditions mellowed to snowy flat light. We found around six of storm snow on the surface crusts when we got there, with another three to four inches during the day, for a storm total around ten inches. Light to moderate southwest winds drifted a little snow behind easterly-facing features with an open fetch.

Snowpack

Below treeline, we found a strong, early-spring-like snowpack where we dug beneath the new snow on southeast and south-facing slopes. While we found remnants of dry weak layers, melt-water had drained between each layer leaving vertical ice masses. The crusts were supportive to skis and hard to break in snowpack tests. On east-facing terrain, the influence of melt-water was less pronounced, although the layer before the storm snow still held a stout melt-freeze crust that would make it very difficult to start an avalanche. Buried around 50 to 70cm deep (around 2+ feet), we found a layer of dry facets below the double-stack crusts formed during the early March storms. This facet layer did produce hard propagating results in an ECT, but would be very difficult to impact on a slope given the crusts above it. On wind-drifted features, we found drifts just over a foot deep, confined to within a few feet of the ridgelines. We could pry these drifts into tiny soft slabs with our skis, but we couldn't get any to slide or gain momentum. This storm snow appeared well-bonded to the crusts below.

Avalanche

We pushed small Loose Dry avalanches on steep slopes that ran to the old surface crusts. These were harmless to a person.