T.G.i.W !

southrockies , Thursday 21st March, 2024 4:45PM

(Thank Griz Its Winter :-) Definitely back to Winter today north of Elkford …. the overnight freeze, has given us a supportive crust on solar aspects (slopes that face the sun) …….. and the 10cm of new snow (with more happening as we left the terrain at 3pm) gave us decent padded dust-on-crust skiing on lower angle slopes. Zero degrees at the staging area at 1300 m, -4 at 2200 m. Visibility was pretty poor due to low cloud, but we didn’t see any new avalanches, and that new 10 cm seems to be bonding to the previous surface. Super interesting (and sobering) was an area along the side of one of the avalanche paths that had a big slide earlier in the week …… that heavy wet slide widened its path by crushing some trees …. we made a clean saw cut on one of the downed trees and counted more than 50 years of rings …… A great reminder for us that “skiing in the trees” isn’t the guaranteed safety move ….