Steamboat & Flat Tops
AvalancheDan Edmiston ยท Feb 21, 2014
Weather
Broken to overcast skies with a light west wind increasing to moderate with strong gusts in the early afternoon. Some light snow with some bands of convective showers rolling through. Cut tour short after some thunder was heard around noon.
Snowpack
All obs at ~9000ft, north and south facing terrain. Genearlly shallow snow (40cm) on solar aspects but varied dramatically with crossloading. An ice crust visible on solar aspects from 5-50cms below the surface depending on wind loading. North facing was 150cm's deep with variable loading and scouring that exposed a week old 1mm thick ice layer. New snow obviously didn't bond well. Found three buried surface hoar layers with 1F wind slabs above and below each. CT found NO reaction on those layers. CTH21 SC failure at 85cm's down just below some sort of facetted conglomerated layer that was pencil hard (See pic)
Avalanche
No avalanches were seen on the drive up from Steamboat. Visibility was pretty poor on the high peaks and wind loading was quickly filling in my skin track during the tour so it's not likely that a slide would have been seen unless it was a bluebird day.