Aspen

Snowpack

Dylan Craaybeek, Jewel Campbell · Dec 12, 2023 · Aspen

Weather

Mostly cloudy and warm with a light southwest breeze. No visible snow transport and not enough short wave radiation to melt the snow surface on sunny slopes.

Snowpack

The average height of snow (HS) on the east side of Richmond Ridge ranged from around 50-90cm while HS on the west side was around 30-50cm deep. The bottom half of the snowpack is made up of a mostly decomposed melt-freeze crust that rests on the ground with depth hoar and well-developed facets above it. The top half of the snowpack is a weak slab of rounding facets and decomposing fragmented grains that easily produce non-propagating failures in ECTs. The only slopes where ECTs produced propagating failures were on east-facing, wind-loaded slopes just below the ridgeline. This highlights the current Persistent Slab avalanche problem quite well; there is a widespread weak layer and a generally poor snowpack structure but the overlying slab is mostly discontinuous and weak. If you find a smooth, steep, planar slope facing northerly or easterly directions that has a firmer slab form wind transport it will be easy to trigger a small to large avalanche but it likely will not propagate beyond the individual terrain feature it fails on. However, it will break deep in the snowpack and gouge down into the weak base of the snow taking the entire season's snowpack downslope with it.