Sugar Sledding around Sparwood

southrockies , Wednesday 19th February, 2025 5:15PM

Today we rode just north of Sparwood. The day started fairly cool (around -15°C) and cloudy warming up to as the day went on, but not enough to make the surface moist. We hung out sledding in small openings and open forest below treeline as high as 2150 m. The snowpack (120-140 cm) had turned to loose sugary snow which rode like deep powder but had us watching out for buried obstacles. 30 cm of newer snow sits over the pronounced layer of surface hoar and facets left by January’s drought. We are consistently getting results on this layer in profiles and saw one long running avalanche we suspect failed on this layer. There were also several dry loose avalanches that ran far entraining plenty new snow and facets.