Christmas in April

Demonic Pancake , Wednesday 10th April, 2024 7:15PM

Lots of new snow yesterday in Rogers Pass and amazing ski in the alpine. We skied Christmas couloir today on the bed surface. It was a mix of soft refresh (10cm) snow over bed surface, soft, creamy and moist bed surface, and soft debris from yesterday's avalanche (see tab for details). Think fast and ideal groomer conditions :D We stomped 2 massive whumpfs on the moraines on the way to xmas, that echoed far and deep, but we didn't see any activity today. We some saw evidence of small skier triggered dry loose today from other parties (sz1.5 or considerable sluffing in STS ) Cheops north looked amazing and all the classics where skies. Some sluff was kicked down STS, no wide propagation. The snow was still cold and light on north aspects, but there was a crust down in Connaught at the end of the day and snow was getting slushy close to the highway.

Size 3 wall to wall on the whole ridge where Christmas couloir is storm snow is sitting on crust and was triggered during the Storm yesterday. The bed surface was reloaded with about 10-15 cm of new snow after the avalanche occurred. We boot packed up the the crown line and stopped there as there is still a considerable amount of hang fire before reaching the top. Crown shear test was breakable, unconsolidated and unreactive, but still not comforting. The reloaded snow bellow the crown was more reactive tho. Multiple run outs from the face and we measured 80cm at the bottom of one of them. The bed surface was still soft and not really icy, but well consolidated with little post holing. There was one other sympathetic avalanche near the fan of xmas of off Balu ridge