Vail & Summit County

Dug around the crown of a recent avalanche at 12,000 feet. The setup around the crown involved a really hard pencil slab varying in thickness due to a wind-loaded ridge, sitting on 4 finger advanced facets. Around the flank, the snowpack was very simple: 30 centimeters of facets in the lower snowpack, with a 50- to 80-centimeter pencil-hard slab on top. Note: the avalanche was coded in a previous observation

It's a sunny day with a light breeze and scattered clouds.

Slabs have settled and gained strength, but the persistent slab problem is still active and slow to heal. The snowpack's stability and structure align with observations from other areas, featuring large slabs from recent storm cycles overlying weak snow from drought cycles. These structures will take a long time to heal and dissipate. While triggering might be harder now, potential avalanches could still be sizable. Propagation was observed on a multiple buried weak layers of facets and depth hoar below the slab. This indicates significant potential for failure, possibly in one or two places, leading to a larger avalanche if it breaks deeper. A good setup for step-down potential exists, where an initial avalanche in the upper slab could gain mass and trigger failures below.