Spent four nights skiing at Swift Creek Huts near Valemount this past week.
A decent storm had come through just before our arrival and even though it started relatively warm, temps dropped as it progressed. Also, the hut/ski terrain generally sit above 1900m so we ended up finding about a foot of cold, dry new snow in sheltered areas when we got in. Temps were -5 to -15 throughout the week with a mix of sun, cloud, light snow and full-on blizzard. We got another 10-15cm Tuesday night and about 5cm Wednesday night. Winds were generally from the south/southwest with moderate gusts a few days at tree line and in the alpine and strong near ridge tops.
We didn’t actually see much evidence of recent avalanche activity. We saw a couple crowns on some very steep north/northeast-facing alpine ridge tops/cliffs that had produced some size 1 to 2 slides but it didn’t look like they had stepped down to any deeper layers. There were what appeared to be some big glide cracks on a south-facing, sparsely-treed slope across the valley from the hut but from reading the hut log book it seems those were not new. We also saw some debris from a bigger size 2 to 3 slide down a steep avalanche path coming off of a steep south-facing peak on the flight in that looked older but I will admit that I was a bit distracted by the helicopter views and didn’t spend too much time looking at it.
Snowpack was generally 210-240cm deep above 1900m in the trees and at treeline. Jumped on lots of test slopes and couldn’t really get anything to pop except for one steep wind-loaded north/northeast-facing treeline slope below a cliff that produced a few square feet of wind slab that slid a few feet but not even half way down the little slope. Similarly, with hand shears we weren’t finding much cohesiveness in the new snow. We didn’t find any shooting cracks or whumpfing. We dug a pit on a northeast facing 15-20 degree slope at treeline and we could easily see a layer of concern down ~110cm. We didn’t really see any layers above that. We got this layer to drop (and maybe pop out a cm or two) on the 26th hit on our compression test. The whole column seemed to slide out fairly easily when I pried it out with my shovel. We didn’t actually get any result on our extended column test but when I hit my shovel as hard as I could a half dozen times after the 30 hits I was able to get the whole column to pop out. It looked like the problem layer was surface hoar (should’ve have taken a picture).
Ultimately, given the limited observations from the area, the presence of this concerning deeper layer, and our group having varying degrees of experience, we stuck to more conservative terrain but still found great skiing.