Vail & Summit County
AvalancheKreston Rohrig · Jan 31, 2019 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Sunny and warm with very light wind at ridgeline.
Snowpack
Looking around this area, westerly facing slopes and many north are heavily scoured by past NW winds. North east to east to south have a deeper snow cover but also have areas that are blown clean depending on gaps or cols in the ridge where strong winds scoured slopes to bare rock. We dug in 3 locations, two in the back of the drainage on south and southeast, and another pit on east. Southeast and east had a similar structure with stout 4F-1F-Pencil hard slabs resting above 30cm of weak 4F hard basal facets. Snowpack height was 150cm in both these locations and ECTX was all we got in stability tests. South was a different story. The snowpack was 140cm deep, but the strong mid to upper slab was replaced by weak layers of facets resting above Fist hard depth haor. ECTP12 on a mid-pack layer of 2mm facets.Slab on top of this layer was still 60cm and cohesive enough to propagate a fracture. Bottom Line: there was a lot of variation in this terrain depending on aspect, elevation, and orientation to recent strong winds. Deeper areas appear to be strong, but right next door the snowpack could be super weak and junky...
Avalanche
We observed many recent natural avalanches on NE-E-SE aspects.