Coquihalla Lakes ridges West

Road Coquihalla Lakes Ridge and found conditions to be good. Snow was dry in the morning but got heavier through the afternoon. Great coverage right now, but some serious tree wells have formed in there.

East of Coquihalla summit (Toll booth eastwards) sits in bit of a rain shadow, and as a result we had a really nice calm day, despite there being a snowfall warning and gusty winds forecasted. Sun even poked out for a couple hours in the early afternoon. Snow picked up again around 4:00pm when we left. Was dumping once we turned the corner west over the Coquihalla summit towards the breakcheck. Winds were light most of the day, and slowy picked up the higher we got until we hit the ridge. Gusting 30-40km

Dug a pit at 1500m on a SSE facing slope with 45° incline. Prob strikes were producing a 250cm average snowpack depth. 15cm (25cm in windload) of new snow was sitting on a very thin sun crust that had light surface hoar on it. The second big interface was 40cm down on the crust that formed mid January. Solid 2cm thick pencil/knife hard crust. Our compression test saw the new storm slab sliding off CTE2 and was a clean sudden planner. The second slab, which was sitting on the January rain crust pop CTM20 and was a sudden collapse. Everything below the crust was well consolidated 1 finger density snow. When collapsing the pit we faked a Rutschblock test. Didn't cut the block out but just jumped back 2m from the edge of the pit wall to see what would happened. Lo and behold the storm slab popped and slid into the pit. Kind of tied everything together. Happy we skied trees.