Quick report
We capitalized on a sucker-hole of visibility today to get out for a look at the Pioneers - where the most snow was expected to fall during the post-New Year's storm.
- We found 4 to 20 inches of settled snowfall on top of firm snow and crusts left-over from the warm-up between recent storms
- There was widespread wind-affected surface snow on upper elevation open slopes (photos)
- We observed a surprising lack of natural avalanche activity
- Snow conditions for quality turns and off-trail snowmobiling are still quite thin below 7500'
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Recent Snowfall
- 15
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Broken clouds in the morning increasing to overcast around 2pm with light SW winds blowing and intermittent flurries of snowfall with little accumulation throughout the day.
Snowpack
Above 9500': Obvious wind-affected snow surfaces dominated the observable upper-elevation terrain in the Pioneers today. We expected to see more natural wind slab avalanche activity... but didn't see a thing. We found 50cm of new settled snow above the 1/1/2026 interface and identified the 12/5 interface buried 4.5 ft (140 cm) below the surface.
7500-9000': We found increasing total and storm snow depths with elevation. There is a supportable crust buried on 1/1/2026 (after a few days of warmth) that is widespread where we toured today and generally thins out by ~9300'. This interface holds small-grained near surface facets that failed but did not propagate in our stability tests. Recent wind has built thin slabs in open terrain above ~8700' that also showed no signs of instability.
Below 7500': Although the snow depths are improving, there's still a whole lot of sagebrush sticking out...
Avalanche
Spotted a couple of old small avalanche debris piles at the bottom of steep mid-elevation rocky chutes but did not observe any specific crowns.