Birthday Pass

Another great day of settled snow and easy travel. We headed up to Birthday Pass and got to see a bunch of recent tracks in Babe Ruth, Lost Couloir, and around Friendship Pass. We made a couple of laps on the west side of Birthday Pass and found soft but settled snow with some areas of light wind effect. We were on the lookout for rollerballing or wet activity after a string of warm days but didn't see much evidence of sun effect. Some small and isolated loose wet activity coming off the rocks above Friendship Pass was all we observed. Thankfully the snowmachine traffic in Craigie Creek had all been heading toward Dogsled Pass so we had a clean slate to leave some tracks on the west side of Birthday Pass. The egress back through Gold Cord Valley was smooth and fast making for an easy exit.

While there are some firm areas and rocks still to be encountered it's feeling pretty open season out there. I'm a little suspicious of larger cornices and slabs of denser snow that are still clinging to steep rock faces in the upper alpine and how the warm temps and stronger sun might be loosening those pieces of snow, but so far not seeing much evidence that this is a problem. Overall feeling like a great window of general caution and time to get after it. 

Snow surfaces were soft but supportable throughout our tour. We observed some surface wetting and melting near rocks and on steeper micro-terrain while ascending to Birthday Pass, but otherwise, the surface snow remained cold and sparkly. On the west side of the pass the snow was a little softer and deeper but we also encountered some areas of thin wind skin and surface stiffness. We dug a full pit on a NW aspect at about 4700' and found about 170cm of homogenous, increasingly hard snow. In our profile we found basal facets and some cupped depth hoar around the rocks at the ground, but this layer was unreactive to both extended column and modified deep-tap tests.