Northern San Juan

With few clouds to keep the warm-up at bay, temperatures climbed from the low 30s into the mid-40s by noon. Winds were calm for our trip, but began to increase out of the northeast in the afternoon.

Supportive frozen surfaces below treeline until midday, even with a weak-ish freeze of ambient temperatures overnight. The snowpack is a little over a meter deep here on shady slopes and quite consolidated, with stiffer rounding snow in the midpack sitting over 20 to 40cm of depth hoar near the ground. Despite this strong over weak setup, the slab is stiff and stubborn, with instability tests yielding hard propagating (but non-planar) failures within the basal depth hoar.