Front Range

Light winds from the northeast with light snow most of the day. Around 2 p.m., the snow picked up, and winds switched to a more westerly direction.

Below the treeline, the snow is about 1 meter deep and is supportive to skis, but weak. When I stepped off skis foot penetration was almost to the ground. On steep northerly and easterly test slopes, I was unable to detect any reactivity in the 30cm (1 foot) of storm snow, other than Loose Dry avalanches that were shallow and confined to storm snow. Above Treeline, I observed north through southeast aspects around Emerald Lake. In this area, snow depth was consistently 2 meters or more, and the snow felt generally strong, with pencil-hard layers leading to 30cm of fist-hard storm snow at the surface that was well-bonded to the snow below. On southeast aspects, there was a melt-freeze crust about 80 to 100cm deep that appeared to have facets around it. This layer was unreactive even in a deep tap test. There was no slab formed in the surface snow, and I traveled through multiple usually wind-drifted areas on multiple aspects but found no firming or reactivity in the snow. I did see one D1.5 Loose Dry coming out of the steeper terrain of the Dragons Tail Couloir and slopes close by.