Vail & Summit County

Light northwest winds with some moderate gusts. Few clouds. Temperatures in the low 30s and rising.

The snowpack started softening beginning around 1:00 PM. I found ice bodies in the snowpack down to about 30cm in my pit on a southwest-facing slope - much less on the northwest. Northwest-facing slopes where I dug had much thinner, weaker snowpack than their west- and southwest-facing counterparts. There really wasn't much of a slab here, and I only got non-propagating results in Extended Column Tests (ECTs). In both my pits on a west and southwest-facing slope, I got propagating results after blows from the elbow and shoulder at the basal facet interface in ECTs. Weak layers in the upper snowpack in these pits were already getting moist and rounding. They're softer and the grain size is slightly bigger than the layers above and below. They could be layers for water to pool, but I'm most concerned about water reaching the basal facet layer, which was practically dry and had large-grained depth hoar.