Front Range
AvalancheNate Pearson · Jan 8, 2018 · Front Range
Weather
Partly cloudy with intermittently gusting wind from the W/NW. It was in the 20s, but felt quite warm when the sun wasn't obscured by clouds. The wind was finding lots of snow to transport.
Snowpack
5-6 inches of new snow had fallen over night. The new snow below and at treeline had not yet been hardened into wind slabs, although had clearly been blown into drifts on leeward aspects. The wind was transporting a lot of snow during the day, so I would expect wind slabs to have formed above treeline by the time of this writing (24 hours later). In a quickly dug pit at treeline on a northeast facing aspect, we found about 5-6 inches of loose fresh snow resting on top of a similar amount of snow from last week's storm. There was a distinct crust between these two layers, but the new snow was too loose to do much more than sluff off in a column test. Instead, we were able to get results at the interface between the thick, older slab in our snowpack and the 5-6 inches of sugary facets at the ground. There still seems to be a crust between these two layers, although it took more of an effort to get this layer to react than it did last week in almost the same spot.
Avalanche
We saw many point releases on the east/southeast faces of Mount Russell and the No Name Cirque and (maybe) an avalanche that had stepped down below the cornice in the cirque between No Name and Stanley.