Sangre de Cristo

Morning started out blue skies and sunny, light winds down low with strong gusts. In the alpine winds were sustained very strong from the WSW. Max temp around freezing. Clouds rolled in later in the day, becoming overcast around 3pm but no precipitation was present

West and South facing terrain remained thin and wind effected with mostly soft snow. There is beginning to be uniform ground coverage on these aspects from about 10,500' till treeline but not enough to bury the larger rocks and sticks that are in the area, making skinning/riding hazardous. North and East facing terrain had mostly weak snowpacks. On top of ridges the snow would often be wind buffed to a supportable slab and as you headed downslope on the snow would generally quickly turn into soft weak snow. The new snow from late last week didn't seem to be forming cohesive slabs in most places however in the rare area just below ridgelines in near treeline terrain I found that the wind had caused the new snow to form a breakable 4-6" slab over top of the new snow. These surface slabs were very reactive, with lots of cracking and ECT/CT results on isolation, however they didn't spread out heavily over the terrain and were not common to find (I traveled on leeward sides most of the day and only found 2 areas with these conditions). I dug a pit in one of these areas and found that the hard slab over softer snow seemed to repeat down into the snowpack for about 40cm, until it got to the buried really hard thick slab formed earlier in the season from the gale force winds earlier in the season. I was able to get propagating ECT results on the deepest of these soft layers and got a collapse moving through similar terrain. These areas are most likely to be found near treeline in North to East facing terrain and caution should be used if encountered however this snow structure was and hard to find with most of the terrain was either supportably hard or super soft.