Northern San Juan

Snowpack

Mark Gober · Nov 16, 2015 · Northern San Juan

View on map

Weather

During our ski we were mostly in a lull with a couple of periods of S2+ snowfall.

Snowpack

We dug a quick 70cm pit on an east aspect around 11.5K. There were easy failures (CT3 and 4) at the interface between this storm and last weeks storm. This interface-30 cm down-has the potential to bond with time as it was not a clean shear, but in the short term may be an easy failure layer in steeper terrain. The next failure layer was on the sun crust capping the storm from the first week of November 45cm down. This layer will be one to watch evolve as it has the potential to be problematic. There was 15cm of older faceted snow below this sun crust which sat on top of the October snow. The Oct. snow was mostly melt/freeze junk. We remotely triggered a small slide near the INSTAAR site as we were skinning on the road. See Picture.