Front Range
AvalanchePalmer Bassett · Dec 26, 2021 · Front Range
Weather
Wind, constantly blowing 15-30mph with gusts higher than 40mph. Snowing, sometimes very hard. Wind was blowing out of the SW but circled around a bit.
Snowpack
All done at 11,157' on a NNE-facing slope that was sheltered but showed evidence of snow deposition. Just north of Montgomery Bowl at the coordinates recorded. We dug a fairly primitive pit to check out the layers of the snowpack Our analysis of the snowpack did not deviate from already-known information of present weak layers. We observed a very strong ice crust with faceted sugar snow beneath it, which was (probe-measured) 90 cm above ground. We included a video of our findings--it's my first time doing one of these so I apologize if I left anything out or said things poorly. We also performed a non-professional column test to see which layers we could get to fail. We observed a failure with 2 shovel taps on the isolated column of a 15cm-thick very soft surface snow layer that appeared to be from recent wind-loading. With hand-tapping the shovel, we did not get the 90cm ice crust layer to fail, but it's possible we didn't fully isolate the column that far down. With some non-technical prying of the isolated column, we were able to get two layers of the snowpack to dislodge from one another. The first was around 135cm above ground, the second was around 85cm above the ground (within the faceted layer beneath the ice crust observed at 90cm above ground). Regarding skiing, the snow was completely upside down with recent wind loading on top of that sweet, sweet powder.
Avalanche
No avalanche observed.