Southern San Juan

The word to describe today was very warm, with calm to light winds.

While the last 12 days with no snow, warm days, and clear nights created an upper snowpack of facets. These weak facets rest on one of our crusts from either December or January (likely December, since we received more rain during that event). Right now, this is where you’ll find the Loose Dry avalanche problem, where you can get quick-moving sluffs on steep slopes. We did not notice any of these gouging into surfaces below this crust, even on more of the northerly-facing terrain. In most places we traveled, we did not encounter many slabs, but in a few places, you could still find wind-drifted snow over weak snow. These areas are not well connected, especially below treeline. We dug in one of these drifted spots, just to see what would happen, and we got some propagating results down about a foot on top of one of the rain crusts. These areas are not widespread, but they do exist in the terrain.