Northern San Juan
SnowpackJeff Davis Krista Beyer · Apr 18, 2025 · Northern San Juan
Weather
Light snow, overcast, light southwest wind, humid, and mild temperature in the 20s
Snowpack
Prior to this storm, the old snowpack was deep into the spring transition, undergoing the daily melt and sometimes refreeze cycle. With the coldest temperatures in over a week, the surface of the snowpack has frozen, but there is still plenty of wet snow in the snowpack. It creates a funky frozen ice hard slab on the surface, floating over a 4-finger or fist hard saturated layer of wet grains. This is a slab over a weak-layer setup, but the surface is just so hard that triggering a crack that would create an avalanche seems unlikely. With plenty of new dry snow on the surface, we can expect a Loose Wet avalanche cycle when the sun pops, and the chances of Wet Slab avalanches will increase as the dry snow rapidly melts, flooding the snowpack.