Cruickshank, more like Cruik-sank!

First cold winter storm of the year, 60 cm+ overnight above 600 m, so we headed to the Castlecraig area hoping to get some alpine observations and maybe some bonus pow turns. There was snow on the Comox main, so we chained up, and parked at East fork main, and unloaded sleds there. On the road, there was 40 cm of moist snow with a crust on top, until we got above 500 m, where the snow quickly got drier, deeper and the crust disappeared. It was great to be back in real winter snow again, but the bottomless snow made for challenging travel, and we spent much of the day learning different ways to get the sleds unstuck. We made it up to 1000 m, where we found a 135 cm deep snowpack, most of which was 80 cm of storm snow sitting on a 5 cm crust. The clouds didn't clear enough to see any alpine terrain, but the snow conditions we found made us suspect that we would see naturally triggered avalanches at treeline and above. We decided to change our objective, kept the skis on our sleds, and turned around. This gave us a safe amount of time to get back to the truck before dark.