Front Range
AvalancheJason Maurer · Mar 26, 2016 · Front Range
Weather
Leaving the Bear Lake parking lot at 9:20am there was no wind and scattered clouds with temps hovering around 25degrees. As the day progressed snowfall and cloud cover increased steadily up till about 1:00pm. After 1pm the sky was completely obscured with increasing snowfall ( S-1 to S2 ). Wind speeds did not increase and stayed pretty calm to moderate the remainder of the day.
Snowpack
Depth of Snowpack @ 10,630ft on a SE aspect was 320cm+. There were three 4-5cm thick melt freeze crusts evident in the upper 140cm of the snowpack. The first mfc was approx. 41cm down, buried underneath all the recent storm snow: fist/4fingers hardness. The next mfc was approx. 92cm down from the surface and was resting beneath 18-20cm of 1finger to pencil hardness layer. The final mfc resided 111cm down and was supporting a 13cm pencil hard thickness layer above. Compression tests produced easy results in the upper 50cm of the snowpack. First failure was easy, 25cm down, pretty much new storm snow interface. Second failure was easy as well ( 4th tap from wrist ) 46cm down that failed on .5mm buried surface facets. These tests were repeatable. Last compression test was hard but got a sudden collapse 89cm down that failed on one of the buried melt freeze crusts.
Avalanche
No avalanches were observed.