Steamboat & Flat Tops
AvalancheRyan Lewthwaite · Mar 14, 2020 · Steamboat & Flat Tops
Weather
Clouds increased throughout the afternoon to broken. The sun had warmed the surface then became cooler and dryer. 2cm of Graupel had accumulated. Warm temps around 33F. Winds were light from the southwest with very little blowing snow.
Snowpack
Springlike conditions exist with Graupel and moist to wet snow surfaces. 1-2cm of new snow had fallen overnight and was melted by the sun. There was very little snow available for transport by the light winds. Much of the upper snowpack was dry to moist and dense. The bottom 1 meter of the snowpack was still dry but the facets were rounding. At 111cm from the ground a knife hard melt-freeze crust was obvious, and strewn with dirt and pine litter. There is an interface at 70cm between round grains and rounding facets where some stability tests were failing in planar form with hard force.
Avalanche
A small Wet Slab avalanche was seen in Byers Canyon outside of Hot Sulfur Springs. A dozen older avalanches of this type were seen on different aspects. Many of these avalanches encountered the road and train tracks and had been previously plowed.