Summit of Mt. Athabasca - north glacier route

AlpineLifeSnowpackReport , Monday 22nd April, 2024 10:05AM

A window opened up for what could be near perfect conditions for the ascent of Mt. Athabasca via the north glacier. We left around 2:30 am and did not see temps rise much above -5 while we were up there. We were back at the road before noon. We probed nearly the entire uptrack along the glacier and we consistently hit 150-200cm HS on the lower glacier and 200-300cm+ on the upper glacier. There were absolutely sections where probe did not hit a bottom indicating that we were most likely crossing deeply bridged crevasses on the upper glacier (check photos of uptrack) There was signs of recent icefall off the seracs but the stability of the snow was pretty clear given the size of the ice blocks that fell onto the snowpack. The ramp up to the summit ridge was in great condition, we chose to boot pack up in order to guage the stability and the snow was good enough to be skiid (no fall zone though). There was snow coverage up maybe half of the silverhorn and the ridge was very manageable overall. The ski down was amazing, probably about 20-30cm of fluffy powder snow. We did not rope up for the descent given the coverage. We were able to cut lines all the way from the bottom of the silverhorn down to the road.