Vail & Summit County
AvalancheDylan Craaybeek · Jan 21, 2024 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
S-1 to S2 with low-level clouds moving in and out of Spraddle Creek Drainage throughout the day.
Snowpack
By height, the slab now makes up half of the snowpack and by weight (SWE) it makes up about one-third of the snowpack. The slab in this area has settled and bonded well starting at F hard (on the hand hardness scale) at the top and ending at 1F to P- hard at the bottom. This rests on top of a layer F hard, well-developed facets for about 10-15cm before getting to a harder layer of 1F hard facets below that. The slab is thick and strong enough to begin seeing fewer signs of instability but they are still easily noticeable if you look for them. There is a potential weak interface within the upper parts of the slab that showed non-propagating failures in snowpack tests and small chunks would slide when stomping on unsupported, steep slopes due to a change in the snow grains but this is far less concerning than the obvious buried persistent weak layer that is still mostly easy to impact. Thin (1-2cm), breakable crusts were on most southerly slopes steeper than 20 degrees but unsupportable to the weight of a skier.
Avalanche
Several small avalanches with some nearing large (D2) on most steep slopes in Spraddle Creek. A few appear to be skier-triggered as a skier's tracks traveled directly into the bottom of a gully and appear to have triggered several small avalanches on the steep slopes above the gully.