Front Range

Avalanche

Austin DiVesta · Nov 21, 2023 · Front Range

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Weather

A warm, beautiful afternoon in Current Creek with a light northerly wind above treeline.

Snowpack

The Current Creek drainage still offers a mixture of conditions. On most slopes, there is just enough snow to walk over, but rocks lurk just underneath what is soft, fresh snow. Around Hidden Knoll, northerly-facing slopes have about 30 to 40 cm of snow which does not have any spot of structure to it. This soft snow made for difficult skinning conditions near treeline. While this is not a problem at the moment, it is something to pay attention to, as these facets will be the weak layer we deal with for the rest of the season. On southerlies near treeline the snowpack was much thinner, five to ten cm thick. The northerly winds over the last couple of days helped move snow onto these slopes and started to fill in some of the bareground. Above treeline, there was a lot of stripping of snow and textured snow on easterly-facing slopes. While there was more snow than two weeks ago when I visited Berthoud Pass, there still isn’t much snow connecting entire slopes yet. If there was enough snow to ride, it was isolated to terrain features like chutes or directly below ridgelines. I dug a snow pit around 12,000ft on a northeast-facing slope in a wind-drifted pile to simulate one of these chutes that hold snow. The snow height is 102 cm, with about a 30 cm soft slab (Fist to 4 Fingers hard) resting on top of Near Surface Facets that formed before last weekend's storm. I got moderate propagation (ECTP13@65cm) on this layer of Near near-surface facets. These facets sat on top of a 41 cm thick slab of 1 Finger hard snow from early November snow. About ten cm of 4 Finger hard facets formed towards the bottom of this snowpack . The snowpack is extremely weak at the moment and will continue to degrade over the next few days. This means that it won’t take a lot of new snow to create dangerous avalanche conditions.

Avalanche

I saw old avalanches that likely ran during the weekend storm.