Vail & Summit County

Clouds and a few flakes rolled in around midday. Temperatures in the teens with light winds.

We saw a couple of recent avalanches, likely from last Sunday, on southeast-facing, above treeline slopes. A snowpit near one of them showed a layer of facets underneath a dense slab of recently drifted snow as the layer of concern. The layer was thin and difficult to trace in a Propagation Saw Test, but I got repeatable results in an Extended Column Test with propagation after taps from the elbow. There was weak snow below crusts and wind-packed in the middle of the snowpack, but these weren't reactive in tests. The basal layer was large-grained facets and depth hoar, but there was a percolation column to the ground in this layer, and it was four-finger to one-finger hard on the Hand Hardness Scale. The top of the north-facing slope we descended was battered by the wind. You could find hard, old slabs, weak snow with a thin wind crust on top, or top-to-bottom facets. Sheltered areas, especially at lower elevations, were close to being unsupportable to skis, and you could probably push small, dry loose avalanches on very steep slopes with continuous snow cover here. A snowpit had no results in an ECT due to a lack of a slab, and while you could still make out a few harder and softer layers, the snowpack was all facets.