Whitepass Feb 4 - 5

La qualité du hors-piste était:

Excellente

Les conditions de neige étaient :

• Croûtée
• Durcie
• Poudreuse
• Affectée par le vent

Nous avons parcouru:

• Pentes alpines
• Pentes convexes
• Pentes raides
• Pentes ensoleillées

La journée était:

• Froide
• Brumeuse
• Ensoleillée

Spend couple days in whitepass thursday friday around Fraser peak and Taiya. Temperature between -20 and -27 at road elevation warning up to approximately -15 up high (warmer thursday). Light to moderate outflow winds from the north up to about 1300m and above winds were generally from the south. Cloud layer on and off up to about 1300m, more widespread on thursday. Mostly clear above that trending mostly cloudy as of 5pm friday. Good motivation to skin fast lower down in the frigid temps !

Snow conditions are highly variable. The 10cm of light snow from Wednesday made skiing pleasant in places where it is still there. Some sheletered location were deeper. Underlying surface are generally hard winds slab but fairy smooth (some sastrugi in usual exposed terraib), ski crampons useful and a fall in steeper terrain could result in a long slide. Lower down there is still some softer snow under the skiff of snow that is good to ski. Ski quality good in sheltered location, ok otherwise.

We were able to trigger a few small soft slab in steeper terrain up to size 1. One small pocket ran fast and a couple hundred meters on the hard slick surface. Although avalanche danger is low, small wind slabs can be enough to make a skier fall. More wind will create more of those touchy small slabs.