Aspen
Quick reportDylan Craaybeek · Mar 1, 2026 · Aspen
Weather
Unusually warm, felt like late April, with on and off light snow throughout the morning, clearing throughout the day. Scattered to Broken sky coverage throughout the day with plenty of sunshine.
Snowpack
The snowpack below about 10,500 feet got a lot of water from last week's rain event. There were meltwater runnels crossing entire meadows on north-facing slopes around 9500 to 10,000 feet. The slab is consistently about 50cm thick and 1F to P hard (on the hand hardness scale) with Foot Penetration and Ski Penetration consistently 15cm and less than 5cm, respectively. We still experienced several rumbling collapses, but rarely saw cracks associated with them. About 5cm of new snow fell overnight here, which settled into 1cm of wet slush by about 11:00 in the morning. The layer of concern, large-grained, well-developed facets and depth hoar about halfway to the ground from the snow surface, is still very weak (F-) and dry above 10,000 feet. Below that, the weak layer is still very much a concern as well, but shows signs that it saw some liquid water.
Avalanche
A natural Wet Slab avalanche cycle occurred here sometime between Thursday and Saturday (1 to 3 days ago). Most of the avalanches went R3 and gouged the ground in places. Several of the relatively smaller avalanche paths went as big as I have seen them go in the last five years and broke some small vegetation.