Front Range
SnowpackIan Fowler · Mar 8, 2024 · Front Range
Weather
It snowed steadily all day maybe accumulating a couple of extra inches throughout the day. Winds were generally light and from the east.
Snowpack
Snow depths below the treeline were around 1 meter deep, and the snowpack in this area seemed somewhat lifeless. On the south and southeast aspects, stout crusts cap basal weaknesses in a multiple-crust stacked layer cake. On easterly through northerly aspects, the structure was either soft fist/4-finger hard snow all the way to the ground with no slab present or strong and deep with no reactivity in Extended Column Tests. Obviously, there is some grey area between these two structures where slabs thin and you may still be able to affect basal weak layers. We did not find higher weak layers in the snowpack. Near treeline we found around 1 meter to about 1.5 meter consistent snow depth with much deeper drifts. On the southeast aspects, we found a reactive facet crust layer down about 70cm. This layer gave hard column test results, but when the failure did propagate, the sliding surface was very clean and planar. Cut lengths in PSTs were less than half the column, indicating if you find a weak spot in the slab, you can trigger a very large avalanche. The same weak layer was found on none southerly aspect, but without the melt-freeze crusts it was less reactive. The surface snow was soft and very little slab formation had occured where we traveled.