Bijoux Braap

If you can’t have pow, you might as well have great visibility and stability! We took advantage and did the full Bijoux Loop today. It was an incredible opportunity for us to see a ton of terrain in a short period of time. We saw extensive wind effect and scouring near ridge tops, the place has seen A LOT of wind during this cold snap. A little lower down in elevation the cold has been “faceting out” the wind slabs, essentially turning the top 30 cm back into soft snow. Despite the nearly unlimited visibility, we did not see any avalanche activity and we did not get any results from sled cuts on smaller terrain features. We did find an old surface hoar layer down 70 cm below the surface at treeline, but it was not producing planar results in our snowpack tests.