Aspen

Avalanche

Ben Pritchett · Nov 16, 2024 · Aspen

Weather

Chilly, temps in the teens, with light northwest winds. Hazy thin clouds and intermittent geographic showers that dropped no more than a skiff of new snow.

Snowpack

The northerly and easterly wind event from around November 6-8th and yesterday's southwesterly winds counteracted each other with flip-flop erosion and depositon patterns. Above about 12,000 feet, few soft snow surfaces remain, with a majority of the terrain either sun-crusted (southerly), sastrugi (westerly to northerly), or stiff, thin wind crusts and thin slabs in concave features (northerly and easterly). Between 11 and 12,000 feet is about the only place you might trigger a slab avalanche in this area - that's the Goldilocks elevation where we found pencil to knife-hard slabs around 2 to 6 inches thick. Yesterday a party in the same area triggered a small avalanche that released at 11,500 feet. Today I could not elicit any cracking in the hard slabs plastered in adjacent features. Southerly slopes got cooked on Friday and now hold a nasty sun crust.

Avalanche

I saw one natural avalanche on Purple Ridge that ran yesterday at 11,600 feet. Near Elko Park, around 10,500 feet in a cold-sink steep creek wall, I could push tiny amounts of faceted surface snow as a loose sluff.