Gunnison
AvalancheEvan Ross · Apr 10, 2024 · Gunnison
Weather
Clouds developed creating a partly cloudy sky. Light to moderate winds.
Snowpack
It was nice to travel through some northerly facing slopes that had some previous wind-loading last weekend and find little concern. Some areas had old hard slabs that also were unreactive as we traveled across them. Previous slab formation has lost some cohesion and hard slabs have become chalky on the snow surface. Where I checked, they further lacked a dramatic change in slab hardness above the older snow below and didn't produce clean shears in hand pits. Recent winds are slowly changing the snow surface quality on some northerly-facing slopes and adding more firm wind effects. We traveled during the first half of the day while other aspects remained crusty. Dry snow avalible to transition into future loose snow avalanches begins to increase above 11,000ft, with most of it exiting near and above 12,000ft. We are still only talking about a few inches of snow above the firm crusts that developed during our last warmup.
Avalanche
Wet loose avalanches from this week. Hard to date each avalanche. Mostly small in size, just entraining the upper few inches of snow, with one wet loose avalanche off of cascade that was able to accumulate enough mass to become a d1.5.