Vail & Summit County

Avalanche

John Mackinnon ยท Jan 16, 2017

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Weather

Overcast skies with high thin clouds, light northerly winds and seasonal temperatures. Measured an airtemp of -3.5 C at 2 pm at 11,200 ft.

Snowpack

Toured on S, SW and W aspects up to 11,500 ft. Our group found the 1/3 interface down 75 cm in a test profile at 11,200 ft on a south facing test slope. The HS in our profile was 160 cm. We did not find a buried crust at our test site, but the slope was a bit shaded and low angle (10 degrees.) CT and DT tests did not produce any failures on the 1/3 interface. However, I did get a sudden planar test result when I gave a few "extra hard" taps after we had officially completed the deep tap test. Both the January storm snow and the December storm snow are rounding and strengthening but we still classified the December storm snow as a persistent grain type--rounding facets (1.0 mm). We observed decomposing surface hoar and surface facets on all the aspects we visited today and a faint crust began forming on our ski out on exposed west aspects at 4 pm.

Avalanche

We did not observe any avalanches on our tour today.