Details

• Date: 2019/01/01

• Observer: Ben Pritchett
• Organization: Forecaster, CAIC

Location

• BC Zone: Gunnison
• Area Description: Anthracite Mesa

Weather

• Ridgeline Wind Speed: Calm
• Wind Loading: None
• Temperature: 10 F
• Sky Cover: Broken
• Most Significant Precip Rate: S-1 - < 1 cm/hr
• Weather Description: Scattered showers off and on all day, but no accumulation. Remarkably calm. Cold.

Snowpack

• Snowpack Description: Very soft surface conditions, with powder on high ground that typically gets blown clean with even light winds. Definitely no Wind Slab avalanche concerns observed along Anthracite Mesa. It's possible wind slabs built above treeline, but not at the near treeline elevation. Persistent Slab avalanche structure is not profound and getting more complicated. Test results were mixed throughout the day, with numerous tests on a variety of aspects. North, northeast, and east produced no results on slopes with prior drifting and more than about 120cm total depth. Numerous cornice stomps on steep ground produced nothing. But, at lower elevations it was easy to trigger facet sluffing in weaker areas further down valley where the total snowpack was less than 100cm. Very little change in HS makes for huge differences in structure, test results, and the likelihood of triggering an avalanche. Southeast, south, and west all produced cracking on steeper slopes that held snow earlier in the season (these had a height of snow >70cm). The snowpack appeared a bit hung over from getting loaded on New Year's Eve. 15-20cm of very low density new snow seems to have been enough to make the snowpack quite grumpy and noisy. There still isn't any stiffness to the slabs, but old crusts are serving to propagate cracks with roughly 1-1.5" of water weight load over those crusts supported by a layer Fist-minus facets that were buried on December 19th.

Avalanches

• Avalanche Description: Triggered one small sluffs in steep shady terrain. Observed two small natural avalanches off Gothic's West Face.

	Date	Location/Path	#	Elev	Asp	Type	Trig	SizeR	SizeD
	2019/01/01  †	Anthracite Mesa	3	<TL	E	L	AS / c	R1	D1.5
Date: 2019/01/01 (Estimated) Observer: Ben Pritchett Organization: Forecaster, CAIC Area Description: Steep gullied features Landmark: Anthracite Mesa Average Slope Angle: 40 ° Sliding Surface: O - Within Old Snow Weak Layer Grain Type: Faceted Crystals Comments: These cracked at the surface like a soft slab, but did not propagate at all. In motion, they poured down the slope with facets visibly flowing under the new snow.
	2019/01/01  †	Gothic	2	>TL	W	SS	N	R1	D1
Date: 2019/01/01 (Estimated) Observer: Ben Pritchett Organization: Forecaster, CAIC Area Description: Gothic West Face Landmark: Gothic

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