Northern San Juan

A beautiful spring-like day with light to moderate northwest winds at ridgelines.

We dug on two aspects around the near treeline band—one on a southeast-facing slope around 11,800ft. The snow height was 76cm with a mix of melt-freeze crusts and weak facets in the bottom 50cm of the snowpack. Our Extended Column Test produced propagating results at the top of the facet layer on two tests. One failed on isolation, and the other was ECTP24. Of note here is that the entire snowpack is moist to wet. There is evidence of water moving through the entire snowpack with percolation tubes throughout the weak facet layer. Our second pit was on an east-facing slope around 12,000ft. We saw dry snow throughout the entire 88cm of snowpack. Here, there was a more cohesive slab roughly 50cm thick that rested on large basal depth hoar. Our ECTs here produced propagation on hard results (ECTP 21 and 25). It appeared that this layer failed in the middle of the facet layer, but upon closer examination, it failed just below a decomposing Pencil minus melt-freeze crust.