Vail & Summit County

Light westerly winds with scattered clouds and temperatures a few degrees below freezing.

On northerly and east aspects near and above treeline, the snow from the first week of December is still dense enough to make off-trail travel mostly supportable. On southerly slopes at the same elevations, a crust formed prior to the snow earlier this week (January 5 and 6) was supportable to travel underneath the most recent snow. Where I dug a pit on a southeast aspect at about 12,000 feet, this upper crust was so thin that it was difficult to isolate. I didn't notice faceting around it at either elevation, and my snowpit had no results in an Extended Column Test around that crust, or a lower one above early December snow. That thicker, deeper crust was strong enough that I think it prevented any failures in the faceted snow near the ground as well. My Pit on a northeast-facing near-treeline slope wasn't too different. However, there was an obvious layer of faceted snow below the upper crust that was buried about 30cm deep below the most recent snow. Two ECTs got propagating results after taps from the elbow in this layer. Fortunately, there is a lot of variation in the slab above this layer at the moment. Moving my pit location slightly, I found a much stiffer slab from the middle of December. About a hundred vertical feet lower, a quick snowpit showed no slab at all on the same aspect, albeit in a more sheltered location. Moving forward, I'm most concerned with the crust/facet layers in the upper snowpack, as I found here. It's hard to say exactly how much more of a slab we need before we start seeing slides on this layer, but it seems like that's the ingredient it's missing at the moment.