Sawatch
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · May 12, 2019 · Sawatch
Weather
Windy and cool in the morning with mostly sunny skies. Winds decreased after noon with just some cool breezes on 13k foot ridgelines. Down in sheltered areas it felt hot. The warmest it's been in about a week.
Snowpack
Supportable snow surfaces on all aspects and at all elevations this morning. As the day warmed the top 6 inches of snow became moist in most places except for high north. I dug on an above treeline slopes and got an easy propagating result in an extended column test 20 cm from the surface. There are very small facets above a melt-freeze crust and below recent dry storm snow. No dust layer observed in this snowpit.---We did not observe any reactive wind slabs near ridgetop but we also did not descend any steep southerly slopes.
Avalanche
A large amount of small Loose wet avalanches ran yesterday and continued to run today. These were generally out of steep rocky terrain. We also observed about 5 small Wet Slab avalanches that all ran on east-facing slopes, near treeline. They most likely ran today. We also saw an avalanche running at 2:30 PM out of thin, steep and rocky southeast-facing terrain. It was fairly powerful running over a bit of bare ground.