Sangre de Cristo

It was bluebird and sunny. Calm to no wind with moderate gust from the west. It was very warm and sunny, I was in my base layer most of the day. I took a temp around 11,300' and the air temp was 38 degrees.

There was highly variable snow depth. Outside of the heavily cross loaded slopes the snowpack was a mix of dry ground/shallow snowpack and deeper pockets of protected terrain. These pockets of deeper snow varied from 6in near the trailhead to 2ft at treeline. In cross loaded/heavily loaded features the snowpack was deeper, I measured up to 1.5 meters deep snow. These deeper previously loaded features remained fairly firm throughout, requiring significant effort to get my probe all the way into. There was a 4" average melt freeze temperature crust throughout all the terrain. On any terrain with sun this quickly became wet while on on North to East facing aspects that were protected from the sun were moist. I got a few very small isolated collapses where this crust failed on top of weaker snow but they did not propagate more than a few feet with how variable the snow coverage was.