Front Range
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Jan 21, 2021 · Front Range
Weather
Windy, overcast day with light snow showers. Snow stopped in the afternoon and visibility improved.
Snowpack
No collapsing or cracking obsreved. This area was worked over pretty well from the winds on January 13/14. Thin, knife-hard wind slabs are buried about 20 cm deep on any exposed slope. There is weak, faceted snow underneath but it would be hard to affect any layer beneath the wind slab unless you found a very thin spot or an area where the wind slab did not exist. In one of my pit locations this slab was absent and I got ECTN results on the recently buried near-surface facets. No other significant test results on the two other buried weak layers. One of these other layers is buried 60 to 75 cm down. This is the faceted layer that formed in early December. The other weak layer is depth hoar near the ground. This layer is relatively stronger than the other two. Below treeline the snowpack is softer and once we build a new slab, we will see easy-to-trigger avalanches.
Avalanche
None observed