Maquilla Magic

With the clock ticking on dry snow times, we headed up to check out a team favourite in the Nimpkish Valley and were pleased to find great access and outstanding snow conditions. Sleds can be staged from the Nimpkish Main, but we fought deep truck ruts to 3 or 4 km on the Sandpit road. Ski penetration averaged about 20-25 cm into fluffy powder with the firm crust not far below, making for reasonable travel and excellent turns. The effect of last night's northwest winds was evident with a day-old skin track increasingly filled with windblown snow as we followed it to ridgetop. True alpine is wind-ravaged, so after a quick look, we scurried back to treeline for a snow profile. Although we could push out small chunks of slab from our skintrack corners, we had no test results in the top 30 cm. We did, however, produce surprising shears on the Jan 4 crust down 50 cm. Our extended column tests propagated cleanly on 20 taps and 30 taps, so we cut out an old fashioned Rutschblock test that failed on the second loading step, whole block. Definitely thought provoking.