Gunnison
AvalancheEric Shaw · Mar 15, 2022 · Gunnison
Weather
CLR Skies, NO precip, CALM winds. Cold in the AM. Skinned and booted in just a sun hoody starting around 9:30 am all the way to the summit.
Snowpack
BTL it is highly variable. Mostly breakable crust with a bit of pow in shady pockets and creamy wet snow in exposed sunny areas. NTL and ATL in the couloir there was a thin (3 cm?) breakable crust over weak large grained melt-forms. After topping out the couloir (around 10:45 am) and transitioning to east aspects that had been in the sun longer, the top crust was gone and the snow was very wet although I did not observe any signs of weak snow on the east face. However, booting up the ridge there was between 30 - 60 cms of boot pen and I was happy I wasn't there any later. Started skiing at 11:30.
Avalanche
I saw debris from two wet avalanches in adjacent paths. The smaller of the two was a wet loose and had released from the rock band mid way up the Spoon Couloir. The larger one released a little lower down from the slopes immediately west of the base of the spoon. It looked like there might have been a thin crown at the top leading me to believe that it could have been a wet slab of wind drifted snow from the last storm that failed on an old sun crust but the debris looked like wet loose debris. See photos. 11,200 ft - S. Aspect - WL - N - R3 - D1.5 - O 10,800 ft. S. Aspect - WL - N - R2 - D2 - O