Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

Jason Konigsberg · Feb 14, 2024 · Vail & Summit County

Weather

Windy and cool. About 3" of new snow up high. About an inch at the trailhead.

Snowpack

The only collapse I got all day was on a near-treeline southeast-facing slope. The thin melt-freeze crust with very weak snow below could be the worst of the assorted snowpack structures, as this combo is consistent across slopes and could produce more widely breaking avalanches, especially with the forecast westerly wind direction. In areas not affected by the wind, there hasn't been much change in snowpack stability since the last time I was here on January 31. There is surface hoar and faceted crystals underneath the new snow that fell in February, but this new snow is not a cohesive slab. If it did become more cohesive, with settlement or additional snow, we may see some small avalanches below treeline mainly on northerly slopes. The surface hoar buried underneath the soft snow is in all sorts of states (intact, lying down, fragmented, invisible). It's not consistently intact and standing up. I dug into the snow around five times and found intact, standing surface hoar only once. I did not get a propagating ECT in any test today, though I expect that change as new slabs form in drifted areas.