Northern San Juan
SnowpackColin Mitchell · Mar 12, 2022 · Northern San Juan
Weather
Clear and cool with light northerly winds. Intense solar radiation made it feel much warmer than it was.
Snowpack
We ascended east and southeast aspects to about 12,200'. These aspects had been loaded by recent winds, but we found the windslabs to be mostly soft, and non-reactive. Some lenses of hard snow existed below the ridgeline and around terrain features, but they were thin, 5-15 cm thick, and also not reactive to the weight of a skier. Repeated hard jumps only produced cracking around our skis. The snow stayed fairly cool on these moderately angled slopes through the afternoon, no crust was developing but the snow was getting sticky and heavy. Below about 11,500' a crust was forming on all but north aspects by 3 pm. We dug a profile on a north-facing near-treeline slope. The snow depth was over two meters deep, and not reactive to snowpack tests. The facets buried on 2/21 were down about 80 cm, 1F hard, and showed signs of rounding. Two distinct dust layers were visible, but did not produce failures with snowpack tests. Below treeline east aspects consisted of a slab formed by recent snows over weak, faceted snow. We saw one large wet loose slide on a south-facing aspect on Brown's mountain, otherwise, no signs of instability observed today.