Vail & Summit County

Clear and cold in the morning with strong northwest winds.

Winds were drifting the storm snow into more cohesive slabs today. Although I didn't experience a reactive Wind Slab avalanche problem. This drifting is surely adding weight to our Persistent Slab issues on east-facing slopes. On southeast-facing slopes, there is a 3 to 4-inch thick very hard melt-freeze crust beneath the new snow. It is hard to see an avalanche breaking deeper than this crust with the current load. This near and above treeline. On east-facing slopes, there was less of a melt-freeze crust beneath the new snow. On one east-facing slope I dug, I found a snowpack 140 cm deep with no significant buried crusts. The snowpack structure was several layers of hard drifted snow sandwiching very weak faceted layers. The weakest faceted layer was at the top of the basal facets and depth hoar, about 40 cm from the ground.