Not Enuff in the Duff

With high freezing levels and heavy precipitation in the forecast, we headed to the Duffey in hopes of staying dry. Our goal was to get to Keith’s hut, but rugged travel conditions turned us around. It does look like some hardy folks have made it up! About 10 cm of snow on the ground at the parking lot (1200 m) grew to 40 to 50 cm by our turn around point (1550 m). It’s still super thin and there’s just not enough of a base to keep vegetation down which made for challenging skinning. It snowed consistently through out the day , and was raining at 1200 m by the time we left around 2 pm. There was roughly 10 to 20 cm of recent storm snow on top of the November drought layer. We did find very large (15 to 20mm) surface hoar in the Boulder fields below Mt. Joffre below the storm snow. This was a super sheltered area below treeline, so may not be representative of higher elevation terrain. But definitely something to have on the radar right now! Overall the Duffy is just gonna need some more snow before the skiing gets reasonable. Good day to get for a walk and get a baseline!