Sawatch

Snowpack

Brandon Levy · Apr 2, 2019 · Aspen

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Weather

The skies remained mostly cloudy with intermittent pockets of sunshine. Light south winds helped keep things cooler, it became very warm and stuffy when the winds would stop and intermittent sunshine. No visible blowing snow at ridgeline.

Snowpack

The depth hoar was very reactive and will be susceptible to further weakening by the wetting front from above despite being already moist. When testing the deeper layers with a PST we initiated the crack in the rounding facets in a layer above the depth hoar and with no initiation in the depth hoar layer itself the top of the depth hoar at 65cms from the ground propagated to the end of the column. Notably the Depth hoar extends into the pack above the bushes and smaller anchors