Front Range
SnowpackJay Colingham · Feb 13, 2021 · Front Range
Weather
Intermittent snow showers, overcast, low wind speeds with no noted wind loading. IC.diamond like "diamond dust" ice particles suspended in the air at times.
Snowpack
We dug a forecasting pit to identify any unknown triggers on west facing aspects before continuing up to Jewel Lake and the possibility of remote triggering slides off Clark Peak. Our first big surprise was that the west-facing aspect had 200cm of snow. After digging the full pit, we found a couple weak layers to be aware of when in this geolocation. First weak layer showed up at 160CM. It was F- in resistance and closely connected to 1F resistance snow within a couple centimeters. In our CT, we found propagation of a slide at the 160cm point on shoulder 3 and again at 125cm at shoulder 2. We also note that there was almost 50cm of "sugar snow" from the ground up! These three layers of weakness indicate that a major trigger could result in a very large slide. This absolutely matches the Sunday and Monday forecasts that followed this observation.