Front Range
AvalancheIan Fowler · Mar 9, 2025 · Front Range
Weather
Westerly winds with plenty of snow blowing around.
Snowpack
Below treeline we were able to trigger small pockets of wind slab on north, northeast and east aspects. The slab in these pockets was still soft and slopes needed to be about 40 degrees to get movement. These were all sliding on a layer of stellas and the bed surface was soft. This slab formed overnight and was actively building. These avalanches never spread wider than the terrain features. In near treeline and above treeline I observed multiple locations and elevations. On north aspects there was a newly formed wind slab on the surface and a generally right side up snowpack. The windslab was not propagating in Extended Column Tests and was resistant in Column Tests. The weak layer was a layer of defragmenting snow, Stella's, and graupel or rounding facets mixed in some areas. Although I didn't find any consistent persistent weak layers, I could imagine potentially finding them if you found just the right combination of shade and wind-shelter (does such a thing exist in RMNP), however avoiding wind-drifted areas would mitigate the unknown of these areas. Southerly aspects had a very stout 10cm thick crust buried about 30cm deep. It is hard to imagine this layer breaking, and there were some columns of ice above it also. There were some thinner crusts higher in the snowpack that didn't propagate in tests. With warm weather, it seems like these layers will gain more water and thicken, but hopefully, they will not facet.
Avalanche
Many small test slopes below treeline triggered easily and I observed some higher slides which interestingly were well below ridgelines.