Vail & Summit County
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Mar 27, 2025 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Mix of sun and clouds and breezy at times. During the cloudy times, the snow surface started to freeze again, especially near ridgetop. When the sun came out, the snow surface softened.
Snowpack
The snowpack in this area is deep. Everywhere I probed was over 2 meters deep and mostly over 2.5 meters deep. A massive trigger caused the recent avalanche, mostly breaking on persistent weak layers buried in early March. It's unlikely a person would have triggered this avalanche. The weak layers of faceted snow that were buried in early March are relatively strong. I dug in several places on north, northeast, and east-facing slopes, and in some places, these upper weak layers were hard to detect in snowpit walls. I got one propagating result 30 cm from the surface on a northeast-facing near treeline slope. The surface snow on northeast-facing slopes near ridgetop was dry, cold snow in the morning. There was some moistening in the afternoon, but in general, northeast-facing slopes are holding a dry, strong, winterlike snowpack. Besides looking at the recent avalanche and dry persistent weak layers, I dug into the snowpack to see how far meltwater was moving into the snowpack. For the most part, free water stayed in the top few inches of the snowpack. This led to moist top few inches of the snowpack rather than corn-type snow, especially on east-facing slopes. On a southeast-facing slope, the water was draining further into the snowpack, but I did not find any meltwater pooling or areas of concern.
Avalanche
Besides the avalanche I investigated, there were two other large cornice fall avalanches. The cornices gouged out snow on the slope but did not trigger Persistent Slab avalanches. I also observed several small Loose Wet avalanches across the highway in the Big Marvin avalanche path (East Vail area). These may be a few days old.