Gunnison

Enjoy a great weekend for traveling in the mountains.  The snowpack has matured through numerous freeze-thaw cycles and is generally safe.  You may be able to find isolated wet avalanche concerns this afternoon on very steep slopes after the upper snowpack has become saturated and mushy.  You can further reduce your risk by traveling in steep terrain earlier in the day and monitoring surface thawing.  

The snowpack has quieted down significantly since a wet cycle that peaked last weekend.  With another good refreeze last night and temperatures remaining relatively cool compared to last weekend, today will be another day with minimal avalanche concerns.  Evan did a great job yesterday summarizing the various isolated/unlikely hazards that should still be on your radar, so I'll leave his discussion from yesterday up for another day.   

Persistent Slabs: Yes, we live in Colorado and have a continental snowpack where new snow adds up all winter over a weak base. We live with this avalanche problem all winter until spring when the warmer temperatures either allow those weak grains to gain strength or water drains through them. During last weekend's warm-up, we removed the persistent slab avalanche problem from the problem list as we passed through a significant warm-up and watched wet avalanches rain down. In many areas the melting snowpack sent water draining down through those weak grains.  Above freezing temperatures made it all the way up to 14,000ft last weekend for the first time this winter. On the highest, shadiest aspects, the snowpack remained mostly dry.  However,  we've gone several weeks without loading and warm temperatures have made for more favorable temperature gradients to promote strengthening. Surface crusts developed on some shady slopes and the warming helped the upper snowpack continue to settle.  A few high northerly-facing slopes could still hold a slab over weak faceted snow. These slabs will not be easy to trigger, and the potential problem lands at very isolated and unlikely in the big picture view.  

Wet Avalanche Problems: We again can look back to last weekend when wet avalanches were raining down. The hot temperatures and multiple nights without a refreeze were causing water to run through the snowpack and release wet slab avalanches when that water reached dry weak layers. Or, small loose wet avalanches would start from a point and then gouge deeply into the wet snowpack, growing in size as they descended. We observed wet avalanches at all elevations from April 3rd to April 5th. Since Tuesday, we have had a good freeze each night, and upper elevation temperatures have even remained below freezing through the day. These colder temperatures have allowed these wet avalanche problems to stabilize, and the snowpack to evolve towards a more mature spring snowpack. Any remaining wet avalanche concerns are now also isolated in the big picture view. As the strong April sun makes its rounds and temperatures climb above freezing today, we will still see the surface of the snowpack become soft and mushy. Since the surface snowpack has transitioned from warm to cold many times now, loose wet avalanches are far less of a concern when compared to the first time they saw that transition. If you are on slope angles steeper than 40 degrees that have more than a few inches of wet snow,  you could probably push some wet sluffs down as a predictable and small avalanche. The more wet snow you encounter, the larger the wet avalanche problem could be.  The current weather forecast is keeping high temperatures in check, and wet avalanches today look isolated, small, and/or fairly easy to manage. You may be able to find a more concerning amount of wet snow on steep rocky terrain.  Now that the snow surface has matured, we're finding that it is getting hard to initiate wet sluffs even where the snow is sloppy wet and unsupportive.  It is always safer to move to colder aspects when those conditions develop though.   

Cornices: We observed a good number of cornices that release last weekend and during the previous week when we were dealing with those hot temperatures. The current cooler temperature trend has again decreased the threat of a cornice releasing naturally. Cornice falls have become very isolated in the big picture. Large overhangs of snow still warrant caution given the potential high consequences if one does release. Given them a wide berth when you are traveling along ridgelines.