Armchair Glacier

<p>Toured up Cayoosh Creek, Armchair glacier and wrapped around to the north glacier and skied million dollar couloir. A variety solar crusts, surface facets and surface hoar is now getting new snow on it. It is very much still early season, elevations below 1600m has plenty of deadfall and open creeks making travelling very difficult. On solar aspects at this elevation there is a surface crust making trail breaking close to impossible but doable if you like the challenge. The rain crust from Monday/Tuesday disappeared at around 1900m. It had about 15 cm of faceted snow on it making for some very slippery skinning but decent skiing. It was warm in the alpine with temperatures reaching close to 0 degrees and moist snow to ridge top on solar aspects. An average snowpack of 250cm in the armchair glacier, decent for this time of year. On the north glacier the snow was stiff which made us concerned of hard slabs. We very very cautious of entering the million dollar couloir and had radios to communicate, spread out and avoided all steep roll overs that were possible. If you’re wrong here you can easily trigger a slab that will push you over large cliffs. We ski cut the entrance to the couloir which went surprisingly easy but the whole feature didn’t avalanche leaving a lot of hangfire. There was plenty of signs of old slab avalanches up to size 2.5. Impossible to say how old. The exit is a beast of itself. I’d give myself at least 2 hours. </p>

Weather Report

<p>It was getting warm in the alpine in the afternoon. Moist snow at ridge top on solar aspects in the afternoon with pinwheeling and point releases.</p>