Southern San Juan
SnowpackChris Bilbrey · Mar 3, 2024 · Southern San Juan
Weather
Wicked winds and periods of intense, whiteout snowfall (S2 to S5). Obscured skies till around 2 PM when snowfall began to wane. Additional accumulations of 3 to 4 inches during the day.
Snowpack
Strong winds accompanied the last round of snowfall helping plaster the new snow into place. This made for soft, creamy travel conditions and easy trail-breaking. We observed minor cracking in deeper drifts, but no audible collapses. By mid-afternoon, we noticed very minor sluffing of the top couple of inches of new snow with ski pressure on steeper convex rolls - minimal snow entrainment while moving downhill. Many areas near ridgelines and on south to west aspects below and near treeline were scoured to the old, crusted snow surface. Digging on north and northwest aspects below treeline, we found a mostly 1F- soft slab with a definable layer of graupel at the bottom (along with desert dust). Compression Tests produced sudden collapse/ break failures at the new-old interface with 15 and 16 taps around 11,400 feet. Below the storm snow is a 4F layer of small (0.5-1 mm) faceted grains. The 2/26 faceted interface did not produce a failure in snowpack tests. This interface was around 40 cm deep, 1F, and below a P- hard slab (snowfall from 2/26-27).