Sawatch
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Mar 14, 2019 · Sawatch
Weather
Overcast with a few snow flurries in the afternoon. No visible snow transport.
Avalanche
This area of the Sawatch zone experienced a significant natural avalanche cycle on the morning of March 13, 2019 or overnight on March 12. Several paths ran as big as they could taking out trees with one avalanche burying the Cottonwood Pass road many feet deep. The biggest avalanches started from near treeline start zones at about 11,800 feet running 2500 feet to 9300 ft. These avalanches entrained massive amounts of snow and probably some moist surface snow at lower elevations. Although the debris looked wet towards the bottom, these are dry snow avalanches as melt water is not infiltrating the snowpack. Walking around low elevation snow, the snowpack was still dry from top to bottom. The wet looking characteristics of a lot of these recent avalanches is likely due to the high density snow that has fallen over the last two weeks. This is my best guess as these avalanches are not something we deal with often. These avalanches seem to have the velocity of a continental dry-snow avalanche with the destructive force of a bulldozing maritime wet-snow avalanche.