Needle(ss) wind

Riding quality was:

Good

Snow conditions were:

• Powder
• Wind affected

We rode:

• Dense trees
• Mellow slopes
• Open trees

We stayed away from:

• Alpine slopes

The day was:

• Cloudy
• Windy

With 100 km/h winds showing on the Coquihalla pass, we thought we would go see if we can fly. With the new snow and extreme wind that's blowing, we also wanted to hunt for weak layers to see if this will be a surface problem or wake something deeper in the snowpack. To help support us in our mission, we grabbed our favourite past coworker who works with the highways crew now.

In the forest, there was about 10 cm of new snow on an uptrack from Monday, and about 30 cm sitting on the early February crust.

We dug our first pit looking for surface hoar at 1350 m and did not find any. By this elevation, the early February crust is breaking down and barely there. There was 40 cm of recent storm snow sitting on about 15 cm of facets from the cold snap. Beneath this, the late January crust is robust. We had easy results within the storm snow in our compression test and moderate results on the facets. However, there was no propagation on these layers.

We went further up the ridge and struggled to stay on our feet in the strong to extreme wind. Another snowpit at 1700 m showed extremely similar results. Still some failures in compression tests with no propagation in our extended columns. The wind was stripping the snow off every surface it touched, all the way down to the January crust, and depositing it much further down the valley.

We kept to mellow slopes in the trees to find the best ski quality and also for fear of avalanche airbag deployment-induced flight in the strong winds on the ridge.