Front Range
Snowpackcolin mitchell · Apr 16, 2014 · Front Range
Weather
Warm and breezy weather overall. 2 degrees in downtown Nederland at 0900, with light to moderate winds, largely from the West. Warmer than expected temperatures approached or surpassed zero even at 11,000 ft. Winds were light-mod from the W-NW. Even though winds could be heard blowing hard at ridgetop throughout the day, they were not moving a lot of snow, and I would describe blowing snow at ridgetop as moderate today.
Snowpack
The area we ascended and dug our pit was an active avalanche area. It had probably slid several times this season. With that in mind, here is what we found for snowpack obs. Height of snow was around 150 on a ENE aspect, 10,500 ft, 35 degrees incline. We dug down about 1 meter. The snowpack consisted of a 10 cm layer of sticky new snow ( fist-hard)on top of another layer which consisted of our dust layer and about 10 cm of large, well-formed melt-freeze grains (one finger). Below this, was around 2cm of moist, 4 finger hard facets rounding (~2 mm grains) From here, the snowpack changed to 1 mm rounds (moist) and at ~50 cm below the snow surface, changed to dry rounds, about .5-1 mm in size, and knife hard.ECTX. No evidence of free water moving through the snowpack was seen. Snow was overall moist and sticky near tbe top and well bonded, cold, rounds below.