Alexandra Sneak

Those who go, know, that access to Alexandra can be very fickle. We managed to push up to treeline today, but not without a fight! We staged sleds at about 0.5km but the little snow there will soon be washed away. The Park Main is now deactivated (sorry, trucks) and we bashed across dozens of deep snow/creek ditches to make it to the Alex/Adrian col. About 10 needed shoveling work to cross. (We're tired now) Light rain was falling at the col, which gave way to snowfall as we reached about 1400 m. At treeline, we saw light to moderate wind transport, seemingly limited to the last couple days accumulation. We skipped the wind-battered alpine. Our profile yielded moderate, resistant shears on varying vintages of wind slab in the top 50 cm (green in photo) and we had no results on the 80 cm-deep Jan 4 crust (blue in photo). Big difference from yesterday! Tough, moist, sticky travel below 1500 m on the way down, we only saw pinwheels but you could probably have triggered some heavy sluff in the wrong terrain.