Sawatch
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · May 2, 2020 · Sawatch
Weather
Cloudier to the north over the Gore Range. Clouds increased in the Sawatch in the afternoon.
Snowpack
Another night of clear skies resulted in a four-inch thick supportable melt-freeze crust for a few hours this morning. We descended an east-facing slope located above treeline at 9 a.m. and found supportable conditions with an inch of melt forms at the surface, also known as corn snow. On the descent, the snowpack became less supportable in thick trees below treeline but any area open to the sky at low elevations was still firm.---I dug on a north-facing slope at 11,500 ft and found a snowpack 170 cm deep. There was large grained depth hoar near the ground that was dry to moist. The depth hoar crystals show significant signs of rounding but this layer has still not seen melt water. There were several ice lens buried in the snowpack from previous melt-water infiltration, the deepest at 100 cm from the ground. Dry to moist snow sits under this layer. The temperature of the bottom 1 meter of the snowpack was -1 to -1.5 C while the upper 70 cm of the snowpack was 0 C except for the colder surface melt-freeze crust at -2 C.---The southeast-facing slope that we descended was much different with snow layer composed mostly of melt forms or small rounded grains with no obvious interfaces of pooled melt water.
Avalanche
Numerous wet avalanches observed especially in between Galena Mountain and Homestake Peak and also large avalanches off of the west-facing side of Mt Democrat into the upper Ark. Smaller wet avalanches, mostly Loose Wet, near Buckeye Peak.