Northern San Juan

Low clouds and periods of S2 snowfall produced 2-3 inches of new snow. Snowfall had ended and clouds were lifting when I returned.

With the addition of the rain crusts from the holidays, our snowpack structure has become really poor. December's drought produced very weak snow, Christmas rains formed a crust on top of that, a few inches fell on top of the crust, and then New Year's Day rains capped that new snow with another crust. The resulting crust-facet sandwich that exists as high as 11,500 feet gives us all the dangerous ingredients for Persistent Slab avalanches: a stiff enough piece of snow to propagate a collapse (the New Year's crust), a weak layer (faceting below the crust), and a firm, slick bed surface for avalanches to slide on (the Christmas crust, aka the bottom cookie of the Oreo). Right now, we don't have much of a slab overlying this bad structure, but the snow that fell on January 2nd is beginning to build that slab. Will the next storm pack enough of a punch to overload this poor structure? Or will this persistent weak layer be preserved by incremental loading and sit like a ticking time bomb for later in the season? We'll have to wait and see.