Front Range

The last day of 2025 provided a beautiful day to be out on the pass. Winds were light, and the sun was shining!

Below treeline there is about 30-40cm of weak faceted snow. Although the snow is probably no harder than 4 fingers the skiing quality was surprisingly good. Near and above treeline on north and northeast aspects, there is about 40 to 110cm of snow, and I probed probably 100 + times on these slopes to get an idea of spacial variations of snowpack structures. Where the snow is shallow, it is completely faceted, and this type of structure probably made up about 40% of the places I probed. In about 50% of the probes, there was 50-70cm of snow. In these locations, there was a weak crust, probably from last week's warm-up. The crust was supportive to skis but not boots, and was unreactive. In about 5-10% of the locations I probed and the two areas I dug, I found faceted and new-snow surfaces, a stout mid-pack slab created in the pre-Christmas wind event, and weak facets below that appeared to be bonding. The slab in these locations was hard to dig through and was only reactive in the Propagation saw test. This structure was very isolated, but if you found a pocket of this snow, maybe you could trigger a Persistent Avalanche. But the slab would take a lot of force to get going. The areas where this structure was present looked like wind-loaded pockets.