Sunshine and survival skiing

laura.stanton444 , Sunday 12th January, 2025 9:15PM

Went for a walk into Four Lakes to survey the damage from this week’s spring like weather. Boiler plate rain crust and refrozen tree bombs to ~1250m, before becoming a little less horrendous until ~1450 where it magically transitioned to ~10-15cm of soft snow on top of last weekend’s tracks. The soft snow was short lived as anywhere even remotely open and unsheltered the wind has hammered (including both meadows down low), and by about ~1600m we were navigating hard windslab and sastrugi to ridge top. Noticed a 1-2mm surface hoar below ~1550m on anything unaffected by wind, which might be something to watch for. Surfaces at ridge top and above are a mixture of scoured to bare rock, rime ice, sun crust and sastrugi. In some areas we even noticed the wind transported rocks and pebbles onto the snow surface…far away from the exposed rock areas. Snow depth highly variable depending on wind transport - anything from 0cm to ~120cm. The wind was intermittent today but otherwise fairly calm and beautifully sunny, so we walked around on the ridge for a bit and enjoyed our lunch before reversing our access route. After some Babine “groomer” skiing on rock hard surfaces, we enjoyed about 5 nice powdery turns in a sheltered zone before descending into a survival ski refresher course all the way to the truck. At least the sun softened the alder road a bit!