Vail & Summit County
AvalancheJason Konigsberg, Ron Simenhois · Jan 25, 2023 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
In the morning skies were obscured and it was cold and breezy. By afternoon, sky cover decreased a little bit but higher peaks were still shrouded in cloud. We did not observe effective wind loading.
Snowpack
Overall the snowpack is relatively shallow but the midpack slab adds enough strength to make skiing supportable. Like many other places, the bottom 30 to 50 cm of the snowpack is composed of faceted layers. With weak snow near the ground and a cohesive, yet thin, slab on top, the snowpack structure is poor. As the snowpack has some strength, it will be able to handle light loads without falling apart. A large storm in this area would lead to easily triggered avalanches, and large and wide naturals.---Below treeline we found a snow depth of 60 to 90 cm. Near treeline the average snow depth was 100 cm. We traveled across some low angle, north-facing gullies at treeline and got two large collapses. The snow depth was highly variable across these gullies from recent cross-loading winds. As the snow depth decreased to thin spots of 60 cm, we triggered these whumpfs. We had to probe to find the snow depth as it wasn't obvious where the thinner snow depth locations were. Digging in the whumpf area we found the failure to be about 30 cm from the ground on 2 to 4 mm faceted crystals. Below this layer is some of the largest depth hoar I've seen this year, up to 8 mm in size. Extended column test results were ECTP4 and ECTP11. The lower score was right at the trigger point with an HS of 60 cm. The higher score was 20 feet over where the HS was 90 cm.
Avalanche
None observed. Limited vis