Southern San Juan
AvalancheJason Konigsberg, Mark Mueller · Dec 30, 2019 · Southern San Juan
Weather
Mostly clear and cold with temperatures feeling much warmer in the afternoon, especially after wind speeds dropped. Although the morning started off calm, brisk southwesterly winds picked for a few hours in the late morning. Very little snow was transported.
Snowpack
Northerly aspects are deep and strong and show no signs of instability. Counter-intuitively these northerly-facing slopes are the least likely place to trigger an avalanche at the present time. Snow depths are from 150 to 200 cm. On westerly slopes the snowpack is much thinner and weaker. A quick hand pit on a west-facing slopes showed a snow height of about 80 cm with snow since 12/24 sitting on weak snow near the ground. We dug on an east-facing slope on the way out and found a snow height of 145 cm. We performed a compression test not expecting to see much. A result with a sudden collapse fracture character on facets 55 cm from the surface led us to an extended column test (ECT). The ECT propagated on 18 taps. we did not observe any crusts around this layer. This is likely the old snow interface from 12/24 before the two storms.---As for wind drifting, we did not observed any today and testing older wind-drifted slabs, we found them to be unreactive. These older wind drifts are soft and are not acting any different than the storm snow without wind affect.
Avalanche
We only observed one large avalanche with good visibility. This one large avalanche was a south-facing slope off of Mount Hope. Numerous small, harmless, Loose Dry avalanches.