Colorado

We toured up Colorado and it was maybe a little early to be poking around up there. The alders are still looking pretty tall in many places. Relatively cold temperatures have kept the snow cold since the Nov. 6-7 storm. We saw many glide cracks and glide avalanches on mountains on the east side of the highway but not on the west. These were common on west and south facing slopes. The snow surface had a funny wrinkly texture to it. With further investigation it looks like a dusting of fresh snow on top of surface hoar created the wrinkles hence the buried surface hoar around 1 cm deep.  We did not see any concerning layers at the moment but we are keeping an eye on the buried surface hoar.  Snow was dry and soft. 

The glide avalanche problem is the main concern in the Summit Lake zone right now.  The snowpack in this area is 2-3' deep and made up mostly of rounds and some crusts and melt forms towards the ground. We didn't get any concerning results in our snowpit at 2,200' on an east facing slope (CT14, PC, 34cm down on buried surface hoar and ECTN 14 on same layer), but there is buried surface hoar (5-10mm) about 1' down in the snowpack. Luckily, it is surrounded by soft snow and looks like it was blown over some before it got buried. There is also buried surface hoar right at the surface (8-10mm) that is only buried about 1cm so some of it is sticking up at the surface. This layer also looks like it got blown over a bit before it got buried. We will keep an eye on these layers as they continue to get buried.