Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

We dug a few snowpit below treeline on northeast-facing slopes just outside the Minturn USFS office. The elevation here is about 7800 ft. The snowpack is about a meter deep and consists of ~40 cm slab that is up pencil hardness, sitting on generally a one-finger hard mid-pack slab and then 30 cm of facets and depth hoar to the ground. The faceted snow at 30 cm from the ground was fist-harness. We got hard propagating results on this layer in extended column tests. Propagation saw tests were repeatable with a 35/100 END result.