Aspen Avalanche Could be a ‘300-year event’

The mile-wide avalanche that happened in Aspen Highlands on March 9th certainly felt out of the norm. It was a nightmare that released naturally, charging over 3000 feet and destroying trees like toothpicks as it piled into the Conundrum Creek Valley.

RELATED: Colorado’s Red Mountain Pass to Close Indefinitely Because of Avalanches

Turns out local experts speculate it to be a 300-year event. According to the Vail Daily, Art Mears, an engineer from Gunnison, has been taking a closer look into what happened. As a consultant who advises where to build structures in avalanche-prone zones, he’s studied his fair share of slides. However, the debris from this slide could be the biggest he's seen yet. The last time he saw a slide of similar magnitude was back in 1995 when a huge slide went off near Crested Butte in the Gothic Area.

The slide connected multiple paths and took out "hundreds if not thousands of trees." Colorado Avalanche Information Center photo and quote.

While the CAIC believes the slide to be 4.5 out of 5 on the avalanche destruction scale, Mears argues it could be bigger. It’s a chilling thought. Originally avalanche experts didn’t think it was possible for a D5 avalanche to occur in the Continental U.S., but the Conundrum slide could disprove that. Time will only tell. Right now the damage is too difficult to assess with all the snow, but when things melt experts will be able to draw a better conclusion.