Northern New Mexico

Small pockets of wind slab still linger in cross loaded terrain features so keep an eye out for evidence of wind transported snow and consider the consequence of triggering one of these avalanches in the terrain your're traveling in. A weak faceted snowpack near and below treeline has created the concern for Dry Loose avalanches on slopes greater than 35 degrees. These avalanches will be small and start from your skis. Avoid situations where getting knocked off your feet might mean taking a ride through trees, over a cliff or funneled through a choke. 

Check out the conditions blog to get the full story of our season's snowpack to date, starting with our first storm back in October!

The avalanche danger will be Low today with small concerns for pockets of Wind Slab and Dry Loose avalanches. Today is a transition day though, our incoming storm shouldn't begin to impact our mountains until this evening. However, the avalanche danger will INCREASE  overnight when the mountains begin accumulating snowfall.

To myself, I've been referring to our snowpack as an "off the couch" snowpack. They've been playing to many video games, they're out of shape, lots of muscle atrophy, you get the idea. Now we're asking them to go run a marathon! How well do you think they're going to do? Yea, not very well! It's not strong enough to handle 26 miles of running and we're going see it begin to struggle right out of the gate. Well, that's exactly the same scenario our snowpack is faced with right now. It's out of shape, it's off the couch, and now it has to try and find the strength to support the weight  of a lot of new snow. It's going to struggle right out of the gate. 

Everywhere you look you can find weak faceted snow. Near and below tree line we have a fully faceted snowpack from top to bottom. Above tree line, due to previous wind events and periods of strong solar radiation the distribution of any one particular weak layer of concern is extremely spacely variable. We have found Near Surface Facets within the top 20cm, a myriad of facet layers in the mid pack and lots of well developed 2-3mm Depth Hoar sitting on the ground.  As this next storm arrives we may see avalanches fail on any one of these layers but more importantly, it's likely we'll see avalanches step down to deeper layers like our Depth Hoar creating a Persistent Slab avalanche problem. 

Our new snow will be falling on a wide variety of surfaces as well. We have wind slabs, melt freeze crusts, and near surface facets. We don't anticipate the new snow intially bonding well to any of these surfaces and we'll likely see an instability begin to develop at the new/old snow beginning overnight. Again, any avalanche, even small, will have the potential to break into deeper weak layers in the snowpack. 

We are all excited for new snow but our sensative snowpack will need some time to adjust to the changes. In the comings days you may find it helpful to clue into the "travel advice" that's associated with a given danger rating to help steer the type of mindset you'll foster if you're planning on getting out. You can find all that information and more here.