Sawatch
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Mar 6, 2019 · Sawatch
Weather
Snowed on and off with a few heavy squalls of an inch an hour. Very warm with temps of 32 to 24 degrees in Twin Lakes. No visibility above treeline but winds were gusty and drifting snow.
Avalanche
I went to check out an avalanche that ran on the night of March 3rd or early March 4th. The avalanche was initially reported as Storm Slab avalanche. After investigating the area it was determined that avalanche broke on deep weak layers entraining a massive amount of debris. We have had only a very few large Storm Slab avalanches since the historic storm began and all of the destructive avalanches are breaking on depth hoar or deeply buried facet layers and crusts. The several avalanches, or possibly one large avalanche, likely all ran at once. Either one avalanche triggered the others or the weak layer collapsed almost at once and all avalanches ran simultaneously. Although not visible in the original photo from Jeff I also found crowns running through the trees.---The debris was up to 30 feet high in places and stopped 300 vertical feet from Highway 82. The debris was deepest where the east-facing slide path off of Parry Peak converges with the main Gordon Gulch path at about 10,200 feet. The avalanche ran to it's historic trim lines and took out some mature timber. The avalanche also ran over a rib at about 10,000 ft that contains the path into thick trees where it smashed through those thinning out rarely hit forest.---It was an interesting avalanche as it is almost certain that it started dry but the debris showed characteristics of both wet and dry avalanches. The wet characteristics may have been just due to high density snow and something we are not used to seeing here. The gully walls were trenched out as bulldozing wet avalanche would usually do, yet below these trenches there was an obvious powder cloud with snow 50 feet up flagged trees.---Historic and more likely to come.