Sawatch

Avalanche

John Mackinnon · Jan 5, 2018 · Sawatch

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Weather

Scattered skies, airtemp of 0C at 2 pm and dropping steadily, light westerly winds below TL.

Snowpack

N aspect @ 10,900 ft: AIARE 2 Profiles: HS 67 cm. Overall, snowpack is weak and consists of various forms of facets and depth hoar. 17 cm snow from Xmas storm series is trending towards facets. The storm snow from 12/21 (1st round of Xmas storm series) is still 4F in hardness but only ~5cm in thickness. Compression tests produced repeated sudden test results on facets below this layer. We also found a Pencil hard melt-freeze layer at the very bottom the snowpack--this looked to be a mix of large depth hoar that had melted and re-frozen at some point.

Avalanche

We did not observe any avalanches.