Snow report Dolomites, 01/25/2014

Snow condition

The snow conditions in the Dolomites are excellent at the moment, a north-south gradient is also recognizable here, but even in the northern Dolomites in Alta Pusteria you can't fault the snow conditions. The tour was carried out on Saturday, the last snowfalls were the week before on Tuesday and Friday. The next snow is expected on Monday and Friday.

Snow quality

The snow quality is heavily dependent on the exposure and altitude. Below 2200 m, we only found broken snow on sunny slopes. Above 2500 m there is also some powder snow on sunny slopes. Due to the low temperatures on Saturday (-15 at the starting point at 1500m at 8:00), we decided on an OOS ascent with a descent on the WWN side. The snow quality there was excellent. (PS. we aborted another tour on Sunday in a northern gully (Hochpustertal) due to the strong wind loads and the poor conditions, which probably occurred overnight from Saturday to Sunday).

On the day of the tour, level 2 was issued in the Dolomites, and I had nothing to add to this assessment. In the night from Saturday 25.01 to Sunday 26.01, the level was set to 3. We could only confirm this on another tour on Sunday. There was a lot of wind and snow in the gullies. There were also avalanche cones on the descent that were not there on the ascent.

Overall impression

I had a great day this weekend on Saturday with a fantastic descent, unfortunately this did not continue on Sunday and we had to cancel our tour in Alta Pusteria and only had one slope with good snow where the wind was not active.