Front Range
AvalancheJohn Mackinnon ยท Jan 24, 2016
Weather
Increasing clouds throughout day. Moderate to strong westerly winds with intermittent blowing snow. Airtemp of -8C at 12 pm at 11K. Light snow (S1) began around 1230 but no real accumulations by the time we left at 3 pm. Snowfall was sporadic and mostly confined to terrain above the lake.
Snowpack
Toured up St Mary's Glacier to 11,300 ft. Lots of evidence of previously strong winds and scouring with impressive sastrugi features widespread above 11K. A skiff of new snow, but no significant accumulations during our time up on the "glacier." We then toured in the trees south of the lake. We dug a few test pits on NE aspects below TL. HS averaged 150 cm where we were digging. We found the mid-January facet layer buried 40 cm down from the surface. It was easy to find and produced repeatable fast and clean results while performing informal hand shear tests. Of interest is that a RB test on the same NE aspect below TL broke on a different buried facet layer down 15-20 cm that must have formed between last week's storm events. RB 4 with most of the block sliding off the large column in a sudden and planar shear. Stacks and stacks (and stacks) of persistent slabs!
Avalanche
No new avalanche observations.