Vail & Summit County
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Dec 17, 2022 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Sunny and much warmer than previous days but still cold. Light wind at ridgetop with no noticeable snow transport.
Snowpack
The snowpack was quiet today with very few obvious signs of instability. I had two small collapses. but that's all. On north and east-facing slopes (NTL and BTL), extended column test results propagated after greater than 20 taps. The weak layer of concern, and the layer that propagated cracks in tests, is the November drought layer facets. Sometimes tests failed in these facets directly above a rain crust, but it didn't seem to matter, as in other tests the rain crust did not play a role. This is different than the very reactive melt-freeze crust, facet sandwich that we are seeing on easterly-facing slopes in other areas of the Northern Mountains.--- The snowpack depth is about 60 to 70 cm at lower elevations (~8600 ft to ~10600 ft). At these elevations boot pen is still to the ground and weak layers near the ground are soft and well developed on northerly and east-facing slopes. Going up in elevation, the snowpack increases in depth. We found a snow height of between 110 and 130 cm on north-facing slopes at 11,000 feet. The slab was up to pencil-hard above the mid-November facets. On an east-facing slope at the same elevation, the snow height was 90 cm. As mentioned above, hard propagating ECT results at ~30 cm from the ground in both of these places. There is also a buried layer of near surface facets 30 to 40 cm from the surface in between two of our December storms. We got propagating results in one test on this layer but in other tests it did not propagate on this layer.
Avalanche
I observed very few avalanches looking out into the Gore Range. There were two narrow long-running avalanches off of the south-face of Bald Mountain. It was hard to tell if it was a small slab entraining loose dry snow or if it was a small cornice fall.