Hollyburn

Had a great day of riding conservatively in simple terrain. Went out with our backs up given the recent avalanche conditions and warnings about the North Shore mountains. Saw very few signs of instability in the areas where we were; which were all low-angle and tracked. Decided to try a (caveat: extremely amateur, take with a grain of salt) column test, which we cut into a convex roll on a low angle slope. Snow was very deep; and the layers were very obvious. There was about 55cm of kind of relatively cohesive nice fresh soft snow. This was sitting atop about a 1cm layer of weak, faceted ball-bearing-like snow, then a 3cm layer of hard crusty ice, and another 1cm layer of faceted ball bearings. Fingers, hands, and arm on the top of the column produced surprisingly little result. A jump on the top of the column and we were off to the races, the whole 55cm top layer went at once.