Front Range
Snowpackmarkus beck · Feb 20, 2012 · Front Range
Weather
Stormy with strong winds even well below treeline, significant blowing snow. Cold temps with frigid windchill. Obscured skies making for very limited visibility above treeline.
Snowpack
Rapid windloading: starting out in the morning around 9am, we produced widespread but not far at all propagating shooting cracks and triggered several very small 2-3" soft slabs - cracks and slabs all involving the fresh wind deposited snow. These soft slabs grew in thickness by mid afternoon, the largest one we triggered propagating about 30ft and up to 7" thick. Slopes more exposed to wind effects were stiffening throughout the day to about 4F/1F hardness. I did not observe these fresh windslabs building on top of surface facets. Doing several quick snowpack observations by digging down with hands and skipoles, I verified the omnipresent very weak snowpack structure consisting of 1-3ft of large basal facets, several harder but not very thick layers (mostly old windslab, some old crusts) alternating thin with weak faceted layers in the mid pack, and soft storm/windslab ontop. With snow piling up inch after inch over the coming week, the winds are rapidly building widespread windslabs at all elevations though most significantly around treeline. These windslabs already are reactive but will grow in size and destructive power posing the threat of trigger the instabilities deeper in the snowpack.