Haines Pass

<p>We headed out for a beauty of a ski off the pass and ended up sniffing out some fluffy stuff and pillows to boot. We observed very isolated cracking on wind features along the ridgeline and observed no other obvious signs of instability during our tour. We found laid-over buried surface hoar in hand pits just above the road ~20cm from the surface which seemed to disappear as we climbed in elevation. We dug a quick pit at 750m on a 24* W aspect (HS 175cm) to look for those special SH crystals but didn't find any... We did, however, find propagating results in our stability tests (more info on snowpack page). Although the slab was quite soft and unconsolidated, we took the easy propagation as a heads up to keep our slope angles in check and write off the tempting steeper skiing nearby. Turns out low angle loving was ideal for keeping the pow skiing prioritized and avoid digging deeper into the mostly supportable crust below. Considering weather, we observed temps of -5*C at the road and gradual warming to 0*C throughout our tour with broken/overcast skies and S-1 precip throughout the day before a pulse of S2+ precip as we finished off our skiing in the evening. The crystals falling from the sky were generally needles (which you don't see every day) and were large fluffly clusters of needles at the end of the day! Winds were consistently calm and the filtered soft light really complimented the soft pleasant skiing.</p>

Terrain Ridden

Mellow slopes, Open trees.

Terrain Avoided

Steep slopes.

Snow Conditions

Crusty, Powder.

Weather Conditions

Cloudy.