Thursday, March 22, 2012

Better Than You Thought

Last weekend, when we ski-toured along the Harrop-Narrows Divide and ended the day with a delightful 1,700 foot descent, we all commented on how great you felt at the end of the day when your trip turned out better than you had hoped. Yesterday was one of those days.

Driving up to Kootenay Pass it was impossible not to notice that there was no snow at all on the trees. Usually an indicator of either high winds, high temperatures or rain, none of which are conducive to good skiing. As we got closer, we could see that the trees had been stripped by wind. Kootenay Pass is a notoriously windy place.

Touring out to the north ridge of Lightening Strike, we were struck by how strong the wind had been. Even deep in the trees the snow was littered with forest detritus, a sign of strong winds, and the surface snow had been blown into a semi-stiff slab. Gaining the Lightening Strike ridge, we decided to "warm-up" with a low angle SE aspect run. The top 50 metres was on a nasty breakable wind-crust, but the lower we got the better the snow got. Not great by any means, but better. Back up again, we skied a steep NW facing line this time. Again, the top 100 metres took work to ski as it featured a stiff slab on the surface. Conditions again improved lower down.

Finally, we broke trail up the east facing slope opposite and had a sweet run down on perfect snow - no wind effect on this sheltered slope. We did it again before heading home.

In all, it turned out to be a great day after all. The promised sunshine was barely in evidence, but we had pretty good snow, skied a couple of runs that were new to us, and, most important, things turned out better than we thought. 

Evidence of the previous strong winds

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