Northern San Juan

Snowpack

Anonymous · Mar 16, 2017 · Northern San Juan

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Weather

Very warm spring day with high temperatures and strong spring sun.

Snowpack

We intended to ski Sheep chute, but do to variable looking conditions we decided to ski the south facing side of Sheep Mountain. We just ascended this slope and thought it would provide some nice corn skiing. After 10 turns, the snowpack became unsupportable to our weight on skis. The snowpack was only a few feet deep on this slope. The scary thing was the more exposed the slope the worse the snowpack. We were able to navigate our way down, but not without a good scare. We dropped around 12:30 pm which was earlier than previous days, but the snowpack seems to be wetting faster now that we have had over a week of warming.