Steamboat & Flat Tops
SnowpackMax Strotbeck · Mar 2, 2025 · Steamboat & Flat Tops
Weather
Clear skies and light southwest winds. Temperatures were above freezing by afternoon. No new snow.
Snowpack
The snow was crunchy first thing in the morning, but by 10:30 the surface crust was melting on south and southwest aspects below treeline and there was already good corn skiing. As I approached the near-treeline elevation band on Farwell (which is a bit above 10,000 feet) and traversed north, I experienced a surface crust on northwest and even north aspects, though the crust on north was so thin I only noticed it when I dug a snowpit. In this snowpit just a few degrees west of north, I found a height of snow of 185cm. It was a dry snowpack that was mostly 1-finger to pencil hard snow in the upper 100cm. The early-February warm-up layer was buried 80cm down. Closer to the ridge on a similar aspect the height of snow was much shallower (115cm) and the February layer buried closer to 45cm down. Traversing over to south and southeast slopes near-treeline in the afternoon, I found the top 15-20cm of the snowpack to be wet down to a crust, and I found moist snow beneath that, up to 60cm deep from the surface on south aspects. I found the snowpack on these slopes to be mostly 1-finger to pencil hard in the upper 100cm.