Bear Creek and the Telluride area featured a shallower and weaker snowpack before the Christmas storm than the surrounding northwestern San Juan Mountains. Above treeline, winds redistributed snow during the December drought creating huge variability in snow depth. Continuous probing revealed areas as deep as 170cms while ten feet away snow depth would shrink to 60cms. The deepest wind drifts we measured were over 230cms deep. While the height of the snowpack varied, the presence and reactivity of a widespread weak layer did not. We felt huge rumbling collapses as we traveled through a variety of aspects, we saw cracks that traveled dozens of feet from our skis, and we remotely-triggered a Persistent Slab avalanche from 900ft away (details below). We took the lowest angle route possible and we are glad we did. The current conditions in this area feel dangerous, exhibiting similar reactivity to what has been observed near Red Mountain Pass, but with a much shallower and weaker snowpack overall. Numerous steep slopes in upper Bear Creek seem primed for human-triggering with very poor snowpack structure...

Upper Bear Creek via Telluride Ski Resort.

We traveled on northwest, north, northeast, and east-facing terrain at all elevations.

As we traversed a 20-degree slope, we remotely triggered an avalanche from 900 feet away, crossing various terrain features and rocky outcrops. We had felt and heard several rumbling collapses along the way.

The snowpack here is simple and quite scary in its poor structure. It's composed of 4 layers: new snow since 12/28, sitting on a widespread knife-hard ice crust (the freezing rain event on 12/28), sitting over snow from the Christmas storm, above very weak fist-minus facets to the ground. The Holiday slab (everything that fell since Christmas) sits over the December drought layer, creating a textbook strong over weak snowpack structure and our current Persistent Slab avalanche problem. The most interesting piece of the puzzle is the 12/28 ice crust, which is unusual for our dry continental snowpack. It was hard to tell if the rumbling collapses were happening underneath this crust, or at the 12/25 weak layer. The ice crust in this area is 3mm thick and the grains under this crust are faceting.

The morning skies were clear with a cold temperature of 5 degrees F at the nearby Goldhill weather station. A little under 3 inches of new low-density snow, winds out of the Northeast were calm, and temperatures warmed to a high of 14 degrees F in the afternoon.