Vail & Summit County
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Mar 13, 2023 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Mostly cloudy in the morning with less cloud cover and plentiful sunshine in the afternoon. There wasn't much wind and there was no current wind loading.
Snowpack
The snow height near treeline was generally around 170 to 180 cm with much deeper drifted areas. The main layers of concern are in the upper snowpack as evidenced by recent avalanche activity around the area. Avalanches broke very wide and wrapped around terrain features. Judging by how filled in the crowns of these avalanches were, they broke in the upper snowpack and no avalanche that I saw broke deeper near the ground. The new storm snow has settled to about 40 cm and it is becoming more cohesive. The top 20 cm is still about fist-hard while the bottom 20 cm is closer to four-finger hard on the hand hardness scale. Although I could find faceted layers beneath the storm snow and also deeper, I only got propagating test results in Extended Column Tests where there was a crust involved. This is mostly southeast-facing slopes and higher elevation east-facing slopes. With that said, I would still not trust northerly slopes with buried faceted layers even though there is no buried crust.---Three was no evidence of a lingering storm slab problem and even freshly drifted snow did not seem reactive as a wind slab problem.---The snow surface became moist quickly as the sun poked out. It seems the cloud cover kept a lid on wet activity but this could be an issue on Tuesday.
Avalanche
A fairly recent avalanche was spotted right off of the peak of Peak 4. A good bit of activity during the storm in this area as I could see covered-up debris piles, but the crowns of avalanches are no longer visible in some places. I got a good look out to the southern Gore Range and there wasn't obvious evidence of avalanche activity.