Cain Long weekend

bengodwin123 , Tuesday 18th February, 2025 12:15PM

Spent the long weekend at Cain. Here is a day by day summary condensed into one MIN. Friday: Arrived at noon to blue bird conditions. The resort was windswept and sun affected, but not nearly as wind swept as the west bowl. We had 4 nice turns dropping into the west bowl then opted to traverse to the guts to avoid the convexity in the sliders avalanche path. We skied the guts (far skiers right) on rock hard wind affected snow. Traversing the bowl was a mixture of sun and wind affect. We skinned back up to L2 and skied "the face", chalky and fast. Saturday: High winds and new snow approx 20 cm. We started the day skiing sliders with the aim of grabbing some nice wind deposited snow before slabs formed. The conditions were variable with wind loaded pockets on sun/wind affected snow underneath. We spent the remainder of the day skiing the 3' oclock trees in deep powder, it was awesome. At around noon there was a clear stiffening in the snow but we did not experience any slab action in the trees. We encountered a group that had skied sliders and triggered a windslab in the convexity. 1 caught, able to self extricate. Sunday: The thought of settled snow and clearing skis tickled the adventure bone. We skied one lap of the west bowl (the guts) on excellent wind deposited snow. We split our group at this point: my partner and I headed towards dream chute but turned around at the stair master col due to a scary snow pit (results below). We also skied some of east cain #1 path on a mixture of punch crust and heavy sun affected snow. The other half of our group continued skiing in WB on good wind deposited snow. They attempted the doors but turned around due to a rapidly increasing (with elevation gain) in thickness wind slab (handshears). Pit results: (stair master col. west facing, 1550 m, Sunday Feb 16, 1 pm) CT #1: 0 (shovel on top, wind slab, 20 cm down on facets). CT: 12 50 cm down on Jan drought curst. CT #2: 1 (wind slab, 20 cm down on facets). no result on crust until shovel shear on 2nd ct. ECT #1: 1n (wind slab, 20 cm down on facets) 11n (50 cm down on jan crust) ECT #2: 1n (wind slab, 20 cm down on facets), no result on jan layer. Monday: Attempted to find nice corn snow in the east bowl in the sunshine, found only frozen windslab/punch crust or mashed potatoes, no action in handshears. Skied the Cain couloir, very very slowly. Resort was pleasantly sloppy but got heavy and sticky in the late afternoon.