Gunnison

Avalanche

Zach Guy · Mar 7, 2021 · Gunnison

Weather

Weather: Cancun 2021. Warm, sunny, light winds. Thin clouds midday seemed to slightly diminished solar warming,

Snowpack

Snowpack: HS below treeline is 200 cm, HS on a fairly representative alpine feature 250 cm. About 15 cm of settled storm snow from Thursday. The upper snowpack was frozen solid this morning and starting thawing around 9 to 10 a.m. on easterly aspects. By 11, it was easy to trigger pinwheels and small sluffs involving the recent snow on SE aspects. No signs of instability on shady slopes

Avalanche

Avalanches: Widespread wet avalanches from the past few days on E, S, and W aspects; mostly D1 to D1.5 in size a couple D2s. Most of these were either wet loose involving the recent snow or thin soft slabs (6 to 8? thick) triggered as the recent snow got moist or wet. One was a large wet slab that failed at the ground several feet thick on a south aspect NTL of Schuylkill Ridge. We only saw one wet loose run today (hard to keep track though), but it was easy to trigger small wet sluffs on test slopes. There were several dry storm slabs that ran last Thursday on northerly aspects. There was also some impressive persistent slab activity from February that we haven’t gotten views of yet, including several D2.5’s to the ground on south/southwesterly aspects of Schuylkill Ridge, and debris piles pushing D3.5 or larger off of the NE and SE sides of Afley, and perhaps the NE side of Purple. https://cbavalanchecenter.org/another-hot-one/ for all photos