Northern New Mexico

Generally safe avalanche conditions exist today.  Two weeks of high pressure weather have allowed the snowpack to become more homogenous through widespread faceteing.  Ground hazards remain a significant issue in travels as the snowpack is generally quite shallow.

Expect the avalanche danger to rise rapidly overnight as the incoming storm builds slabs on top of these widespread weak layers.  

Today is the last day of general stability in our snowpack before things change in a big way with the incoming winter storm.  Two weeks of high pressure weather without all that much wind has enabled much of the snow that fell in early January to deteriorate and facet.  In travels yesterday we struggled to find evidence of lingering slabs and have decided to take Persistent Slab off the problem list for today.  If you're getting out there, enjoy this moment of relative stability before things shift - likely drastically - this weekend.  Downhill travel has definitely improved a bit with all of the faceting near the surface allowing for better glide, yet uphill and on-foot travel remain challenging and ground hazards abound.

Low avalanche danger can occur for a variety of reasons, but unfortunately they aren't all created equal.  The flipside of this moment of stability is that we have incredibly weak snow all the way from the surface to the ground level on Northerly aspects, East aspects, and our unique West-facing avalanche paths.  These persistent weak layers reach all the way down to about 9500' and consist of well-developed near surface facets in the upper portions of snowpack plus large facets and depth hoar closer to the ground.  In many places, a very faint melt-freeze crust from warm wet weather around Christmas delineates these two regions of the snowpack (see video), and as we look ahead to one of our best winter storms in well over a year we are concerned about all of this weak snow.  Heavy snowfall and wind tranport will easily build slabs above these weak layers, making it easy to trigger persistent slab avalanches again.  The upper portions of the December snow (which we're calling the December drought layer) were the most problematic during the last storm cycle, but to be honest we're concerned about all of these weak layers leading to avalanches during the incoming storm.  While the depth of the weak layer does matter, we're talking about putting at least a 1-2 foot slab on top with this storm, so wherever these slabs decide to fail, the resulting avalanches would be large.

Current models are converging around 1.5" SWE falling in the mountains during this storm cycle, which would mean something like 16-20 inches of snowfall with the expected densities.  This would be a fantastic return to winter conditions that we haven't seen in quite a while, and also significant avalanche activity that we haven't seen in quite a while.