Northwest Coastal

Spent a couple nights south of Geronimo Peak. April 30th, toured to Wolverine Pass. The snow was rock hard early morning, then really nice & slushy early afternoon, then very heavy. Saw and heard lots of avalanche activity. Mostly seems to be going on sunny slopes, start zones on cliffs. May 1st, the rain earlier made for a challenging exit as the snow was very reactive on steep slopes. Saw triple the amount of avalanche debris in Geronimo bowl compared to when we skinned in on April 29.

Excellent travel conditions in the backcountry. Beautiful corn on south facing slopes, firm but could still hold an edge on north facing slopes. Little active avalanche activity on the weekend, but lots of evidence of wet loose avalanches in the previous days.

Traveled on a variety of aspects and elevations today. Low elevation forest travel is unsurprisingly bad - Cornice Ridge up track is kind of worst of all worlds, too much snow for sneakers, too little for good skinning. Expect it to take significantly more time than usual. There was a firm crust across all aspects above about 1000m in the morning. Softened significantly on south and east faces through the day, but not north or west, where it remained very firm well into the afternoon. Heads up for bears out there! We spotted some tracks crossing from Polywood area over to Zymacord and down the Zym trees ridge. We heard a very large cornice fall or rock fall a few ridges north of us around 1030am but observed no activity directly. There are quite a few newish cornice fall avalanches to size 2 in the Shames area - they aren’t triggering anything, but the cornices themselves remain huge in many places.