Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

Mike Cooperstein · Mar 4, 2019 · Vail & Summit County

Weather

Clear day in the mountains. Ridegline wind speeds were in the 20-30 mile per hour range and a lot of snow was moving around. At lower elevations out of the wind it felt quite warm. No new snow in the past 24 hours.

Snowpack

The snowpack is still surprisingly shallow especially in higher elevation wind-prone areas. The average depth was only about 125 cm some wind-loaded areas were up to 200 cm deep. The snowpack is composed of new snow, then decomposing and broken particles, a 1 finger hard mid-pack slab a layer of weak facets over top of a crust then 25-30cm of depth hoar to the ground. The snowpack was unresponsive to snowpack tests; however, the basal layers are still very weak. There was a surprising lack of avalanche activity to be found anywhere we looked.