Front Range
SnowpackRich Rogers · Mar 5, 2024
Weather
Morning was pleasantly warm( high 20s-32ºF), light breeze and scattered clouds rolled overhead. Early afternoon, wind increased and started transporting snow just across the existing snow surface with each gust of wind, flurries took over for the afternoon with bursts of stronger snowfall. This subsided back flurries until late afternoon.
Snowpack
Compared to my visit on 2/6/24, the snow pack here is slightly, 2-4", deeper, in protected leeward slopes, and has gained some strength on slopes that are deeper than 3-5ft. While, visually, the snow cover in and around the old ski area has been wind swept to various levels by strong persistent winds W and NW winds. I was able to observe some some minor cracking in firm old and new snow surfaces approx. 8-10" thick. These firm and thicker surface layers were stubborn to 2-4 hard kicks with a ski then a crack would shoot to where the slab tapered and the length of the ski. In a 3' deep, NE facing, near treeline, snow pit there were a few weak layers. A recently buried wind board, an old melt freeze crust and basal facets. The facets just under the wind board were more reactive than deeper weak layers during snowpack tests. The caveat to this is the deeper layers still showed propagating results but with harder amounts of force during loading steps. This reminds me of the importance to consider locations where the snowpack is thinner(near rocks, trees, shallower slopes connected to deeper ones) as a place I might be able to trigger a failure in these deeper layers resulting in a larger avalanche. Another way to look at this is low frequency with higher consequences. A note on the wind board and near surface facets, the wind board would sometimes break further back while trimming the walls of a pit under the pressure sharp end of a shovel. This may be a variation in thickness and that wind board may already be degrading or becoming weaker. Though, NTL, it would only support a human on skis. Weight of a human off skies would penetrate the snow to high ankle deep. Below treeline, off the existing skin track, the snowpack frequently felt "trap-door-like" and in many places the slab was not continuous or total depth was very shallow(~12"). Pit wa dug close to 2/6 location. 2/6/2024 Obs- https://avalanche.state.co.us/observations/field-report/664d68b1-a4c3-4328-9fc3-ca1f3af7ad14