Vail & Summit County

Snowpack

Jason Konigsberg · Nov 20, 2023 · Vail & Summit County

Weather

There was about 4 inches of snow from the storm that started late on Saturday. Winds were calm at the sheltered and moderate, out of the north, at the ridgetop. Snowfall during my outing was off and on with some pulses of snow at an intensity of about half an inch per hour.

Snowpack

All of my observations are from northerly slopes. Below treeline the snowpack is very weak but I did not observe any cracking or collapsing. As soon as I got to the near treeline elevation band, the surface snow felt a little harder and I experienced numerous, small shooting cracks. The small cracks and collapses weren't just directly below ridgeline, but anywhere the upper snowpack was slightly stiffer. The overall snowpack is 40 cm deep. The top 10 cm is new snow that is fist-hard on the hand-hardness scale. The bottom 30 cm is well-developed faceted crystals that are also fist-hard. Although the two layers have the same hardness, the faceted snow is much less cohesive and falls easily out of snowpit walls. I also noticed a thin melt-freeze crust on northeast-facing slopes below the new snow. - As we saw over the last two days in the Central Mountains, with a couple of large and wide avalanches reported, the snowpack is extremely weak on northerly aspects and it won't take much snow to see avalanches. The Central Mountains has been favored with snow, but once the Northern Mountains catches up, we can expect to see similar avalanches.