Grey Day

A blustery day in the Robson Valley today with the usual strong southerly winds stripping all the snow off the trees up at McBride Peak. With the lack of significant new snowfall this week, south and west aspects are still pretty crunchy from previous sun effect and not fun to ski - so we did some short laps in the soft powder of steep north facing trees and chutes. We dug a quick pit around 1650m in some open trees and found no weak layers and a very stable looking snowpack. We also saw no signs of avalanches in the area or other indicators of instability, which slowly gave us confidence to ski pitches up to 45 degrees in steepness. We suspect that fresh windslabs are likely forming at treeline and above on north through east aspects.