Illecillewaet Glacier and Ravens North Couloir
o.denislarocque,
Tuesday 3rd December, 2024 12:00AM
We spent the day on the Illecillewaet Glacier and The Ravens North Couloir area. The approach is convoluted and challenging as it often is at this time of the year. The glacier has snow depths ranging from 160-250cm.
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15-25cm of facetted low-density snow overlies previous wind effect and a melt-freeze crust down 60cm. Below that, the mid pack is quite dense (1F to P hardness by my rough estimate probing about). We navigated the crevasses roped up and probing suspect bridges. There's loads of open crevasses and sags in the area. We did not follow the "standard uptrack" as it looked pretty rugged from below.
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We barely saw any signs of isolated winds slabs. Small cookies were cracking off above previous ski tracks directly lee of ridgetop. The top 20-30cm of wind effect/wind slab had facetted out leaving us with delicious blower snow in the couloir. The Asulkan trail is in decent shape with a few rocks here and there. The snow stayed dried throughout the day. No evidence of significant wind transport - winds stayed in the light to low moderate range from the SW.
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Important note: We met a solo ski tourer heading up the Illecillewaet Glacier and following our uptrack UNROPED AND ALONE. We recommended he turned around after explaining the hazards at play but alas he followed us through the crevasse maze. While I'm all for sharing the stoke in the backcountry and not shaming folks, this is reckless and discouraged, especially given the early season conditions and generally weak bridging of crevasses. Unroped crevasse falls are generally fatal.





Location: 51.23229383 -117.43105417