Southeast Mountains

Warmer overnight temperatures will allow snow surfaces to soften earlier today. On southerly-facing slopes, watch for developing wet avalanche concerns. If you find a few inches of wet snow in steep terrain, small wet loose avalanches will be possible. Or, if you find conditions where your boots sink deeply into wet snow, you've found an isolated area that could potentially produce a wet slab avalanche. 

On the north half of the compass, heightened avalanche conditions remain due to a lower-likelihood but high-consequence persistent slab problem. Choosing terrain with a deeper, more uniform snowpack and fewer thin spots will help reduce the chance of triggering one of these old slabs. The recent avalanche on Mt. Whetstone is an example of terrain to avoid, where a thick slab transitions to thinner trigger points near its edges.

A weather station in Crested Butte at 8,923ft stayed above freezing last night, with a low temperature of around 35 degrees. Weather stations closer to 11,000ft, like Elkton and Schofield, recorded low temperatures in the 28 to 30 degree range. Those temperatures were higher than previously expected, so more attention was put on potential wet avalanche problems today. The snow surface has gone through numerous freeze-thaw cycles, and this has helped the loose wet avalanche problem become more resistant. The snow surface will need to become wet and start losing cohesion before that avalanche problem potentially develops later today. 

Regarding wet slabs, water is moving through the snowpack slowly. With a weaker freeze, we can't rule out the potential of this problem developing on some terrain today. The east and west sholder aspects have seen a hybrid of persistent slabs vs wet slabs, as the warming temperatures make slabs softer so that the weight of a human can more easily affect buried weak layers, and those weak layers are becoming moist to wet on some slopes, decreasing the strength of the weak layer. 

An extreme wind event passed through the mountains on Tuesday night and into Wednesday Morning. During that event, the wind direction was initially out of the west-southwest, before backing to the west and eventually northwest. Those winds, unfortunately, destroyed much of the soft snow on northerly-facing slopes. They also created a few hard wind slabs. One of those small slabs was human-triggered in steep, northerly-facing terrain near Ohio Pass. While more notably, this large persistent slab avalanche on Mt Whetstone may have run during that wind event.

The recent Whetstone avalanche is the first persistent slab avalanche that we have documented in the forecast area, since a small slab was human-triggered on Snodgrass Mountain on March 4th, or other large avalanches occurred in late February. Outside of our forecast area, there were several destructive avalanches that ran above Conundrum Creek during last Friday's storm.   Closer to home, we continue to find the most concerning snowpack structures along the eastern side of the forecast area. Brush and Cement Creek areas, which typically had the weakest layers going into the February storms, now have thinner slabs that remain more susceptible to human triggers and thinner rain crusts in the upper snowpack. Despite the lack of persistent slab avalanche activity in our Northwest Mountain forecast area, land mines do exist across our entire forecast zone. Careful terrain selection remains essential for managing the persistent slab avalanche problem.