Mt Alice/ big pine creek

Quick report

Went down to explore Big Pine Creek, to see how deep the snow was and what was going on with the snowpack down there. The idea was to see what was going on on the south slopes of Mount Alice. When we arrived, the top bit of the snow felt very stable, and so we began skinning the south face. About 1/3 of the way up we dug a pit and we found the snow to be 90cm deep, generally right side up except for a layer of weak wet snow at the bottom, which failed on a CT23. As we were digging, an extremely humid, hot mass of fog rolled into the valley, which seemed to turn the snow from relatively light powder to a heavy wet snow quite quickly. We decided to not be on that aspect anymore after that and skiied down, pivoting to checking out some north facing aspects on the western flanks of kidd mountain. We dug another pit at the base of those. Our results were as follows: Snow: 155 cm deep 0-20cm Fist 20-25cm Knife 25-30cm 4 finger 30-40cm 1 finger 40-65cm 4 fingers 64-85cm knife 85-105cm 4 fingers 105-155cm fist There was a CT23 failure at 110 cm between 4 fingers and fist, which seemed not to propagate very much. We could not facilitate a deep failure on the 0-20cm facets. We felt comfortable skiing some 35 degree trees and the fanning apron on this northern aspect. No avalanches were triggered and a good time was had by all.