I was pleasantly surprised by the overall coverage of Rabbit Ears Pass. I heard rumors of two avalanches, but visibility kept us from finding them. While you still had to be slightly cautious about what was underneath piles of snow. With the most recent storm, this area picked up about a foot to two feet of snow over the last week. I generally found relatively weak, unsupported snow in most places. Your track would trench in fairly easily, even when just making turns. We mainly rode in sheltered areas and saw no signs of collapsing or cracking. However, I could easily trigger a small cornice once we got into the more wind-exposed areas. As soon as you came out into big meadows or near a ridge, you could tell that the wind affected the snow way more and created a denser slab than I had found overall throughout most of the day. We did note a small crust layer, which appears to be a mist layer. You could feel this on your foot while making turns, it was about a six to twelve inches down.

Rabbit Ears Pass

Parked at Muddy Creek Trailhead then road north towards Elmo then back to the cars

The snowpack I found around Rabbit Ears was weak, no matter how you look at it The storm produced about a foot to two feet of new snow, which fell on top of faceted snow from earlier in the year, While snow depths were over a meter in most places I probed and dug today You can trench your sled into these layers In my sheltered pit with a snow height of 140cm, I didn’t find a slab resting on the weak snow at the ground, but we did get propagation on an Extended Column Test at the ground, ECTP 29 at the ground However, in my second pit I found a slightly shallower spot at 120cm and with a bit of a denser slab The ECT on this pit broke from taps from the elbow and propagated (ECTP15 at 45cm) underneath a melt-freeze crust, which formed pre-Thanksgiving.

A blustery day on Rabbit Ears Pass. The parking lot had about two feet of snow in it from the storm when we arrived. Overall, temperatures weren’t too bad. It was snowing throughout the day in varying degrees of intensity. Looked like we picked up an additional three to four inches throughout the day.