Hospital Bowl Access Attempt

Happy winter, friends! We attempted to access Hospital Bowl this morning to ski Ursus Trees. We were not surprised to find that the climb past Hospital Gully is still extremely boney. I probed an HS of 52cm at 1770m and we turned around shortly thereafter. The first photo on this MIN shows the access to Hospital Bowl from the bottom of Hospital Gully. The shark levels were beyond our risk threshold for a potential shallow egress so we decided to turn back. There is a fairly good supportive crust below 1700m, so the ski out in Connaught Creek was significantly better for us than many reports I’ve read so far this season. We also experienced “snow riser” type glopping on the way up with some heavier warmer snow. This should bode well for continued supportive layers around this altitude. Above 1700m that crust disappears and super light almost cold-smoke snow sits directly on the ground and rocks. I’ve heard mixed reports that other areas in this valley have a supportive layer above 1700m but we did not find it where we were. 15-20cms of new snow accumulated during the 4 hours that we were skiing, so better conditions should be just around the corner! We heard two “small sounding” avalanches, probably just storm snow sloughing down the northern chutes of Cheops, but we did not see them due to the cloud cover. Difficult to say exactly how large or where they were. They sounded like 0.5s Cheers! Where your helmets!