Gunnison

Snowpack

Anonymous · Mar 4, 2022 · Gunnison

Weather

Warm and cloudy, with enough sun filtering through the clouds for excellent greenhousing.

Snowpack

Snow surfaces got damp on all aspects that we traveled on, which spurred rollerballs and pinwheels on more northerly aspects which have stayed mostly dry all week. We looked at a number of NE-facing slopes that avalanched naturally during the last cycle. The previous avalanche activity did NOT flush out the facet layer; rather they just scraped off the top layer of the sandbox and left a thin bed surface crust in places. I expect repeat offenders on these slopes once slabs rebuild. We got several localized collapses (radiated about 10 or 15 feet) on low angle east and steeper northeast. We got a mix of easy propagating and non-propagating results with ECTs. Hard to find steep terrain around here that didn’t run naturally during the storm. On a steep ESE slope, the top 6? is a stout melt-freeze crust and water has percolated through the sandbox. On a steep ENE slope, slabs were getting moist and/or there was some kind of thin surface crust, but the weak layer remained dry or could have been moist in some slopes.