Gunnison

The avalanche danger is low with generally safe avalanche conditions. If you are traveling on steep slopes and extreme terrain, you can expect to encounter loose snow avalanches and isolated soft slabs. Remember, even a small avalanche can push you off a cliff or accumulate mass in big terrain. Yesterday's observations paint a good visual for the same problems you can encounter today. Example 1, 2, 3. 

On Friday, our forecast area accumulated between 2" and 5" of low-density new snow. This has turned our primary focus to managing these new snow instabilities. Any continued avalanche activity today is expected to remain small and relatively harmless unless it pushes you into more hazardous terrain features. Avalanches that would become large in size are expected to be very unlikely and very isolated across the forecast area. If you are traveling on steep slopes and or extreme terrain you will primarily run into a loose snow avalanche problem. These would be dry sluffs on the northern half of the compass, and thicker loose wet avalanches on the southern half of the compass. 

Shallow soft slab avalanches appear to be isolated in their distribution. These slabs are expected to be 4" to 7" thick and would propagate wider than a loose snow avalanche. This avalanche type could break above your skis and more quickly take you off your feet in extreme terrain. Yesterday observers found just a couple of small pockets with this avalanche problem. The key ingredients were upper elevations, where the wind had some slight effect on the new snow, and where that new snow was sitting on very weak faceted old snow near cliffs and areas protected from the previous wind-storms earlier this month. 

Upper elevation winds begin to increase into the teens or 20's later this afternoon. Small wind slabs may form late this afternoon near ridgelines at above treeline elevations. We'll keep our eye on this developing avalanche problem as we look at tomorrow's avalanche forecast. Currently, the avalanche danger is expected to remain LOW. However, if we observe enough wind and transporting snow the avalanche danger could bump to MODERATE at upper elevations for tomorrow. 

Basal weak layers that were responsible for the extensive avalanche activity at the end of December have become dormant. The deep slab avalanche problem was dropped for the NW Mountains on Thursday, while the persistent slab avalanche problem was dropped in the SE Mountains on Saturday. It has been 3 weeks since the last natural avalanche released on basal weak layers and nearly 2 weeks since the last explosively triggered avalanche. The lack of snowfall in January has given the snowpack enough time to adjust that even if you find a trigger point, it is still unlikely to trigger an avalanche on those early season weak layers.