It Ain’t Over till the Kings Go Wild

Spent Thursday to Sunday at Elfin hut. Snow conditions were widely very bad, with surface snow ranging from breakable crust to heavy cement. We were lucky on Friday to find some good heavy turns off the summit ridge of Columnar, but outside of that the rain and warm temps pretty well ruined everything. Friday saw ~10-15cm of wet snow which settled very quickly into a slab. Overnight Friday and all day Saturday it rained at a steady pace. Sunday morning the rain and fog cleared, and we were treated with some excellent views to ski out with. Overall, the weather was quite bad with high freezing levels and rain, fog, and wind. We saw evidence of wet loose slides out of steep alpine terrain to sz 1 on east to southeast aspect. We did not observe any slab avalanches, including on Sunday when visibility improved. We did not observe any signs of instability in our travels. Widespread rain runnels on our way out this morning, with a 3cm surface crust breaking down in the sun as we skied back to Squamish. I lost 5 crowns and had to carry out the garbage :(