Vail & Summit County
SnowpackAustin DiVesta · Mar 29, 2022 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
A weird wintry mix of weather today. When I first started, it was snowing a little bit and had a wind out of the north, but after an hour, the winds switched to the west. Temperatures were relatively warm without the wind, but around 1:00 pm, a cold air mass moved into at least 12,00ft. Low clouds limited my visibility to about 1/4 mile when I was on the ascent but started to lift around 1:00 pm. The sun began to come through the clouds a little on the descent
Snowpack
Today, I traveled on mostly south through west-facing slopes. I found about an inch or two of new snow on the old snow surface, but not enough to cover old tracks. Around 11 am, the snow was still cold and supportable with a solid melt-freeze crust. On my ascent, the sun was not strong enough to affect the new snow. As I moved up in elevation towards near treeline, I found pretty similar conditions, but with more wind to blow around the new snow. I found an east-facing slope to dig a snowpit. This location is wind-loaded with a snow height of 290cm. The upper portion of the snowpack was the most interesting, with a mixture of several melt-freeze crusts/facet combinations in the upper 20-30cm. All of that sits on a solid slab that is about 1 finger hard for about a meter. While probing around, the snowpack seemed reasonably consistent with a supportable slab in the middle. I performed an Extended Coloum Test and did not fully get the column isolated before the top 20cm propagated across the entire column. This makes sense with a mixture of wind-drifted snow and two crust/facet combinations. It was hard to tell with snow-loading into the pit, but the facets were dry to moist. While I couldn’t make a snowball out of them, I was able to form them into a smaller piece of snow. When I skied down after this, the sun started to come through the clouds, and the new snow became moist quickly and formed a sticky ball of snow. As I exited, I found a steeper bank to cut across and had bathtub size collapse happen to the ground ( ~HS130cm). I saw wet snow down to the ground where you could squeeze water out.