Cain west bowl

Riding quality was:

Good

Snow conditions were:

• Powder
• Wind affected

We rode:

• Convex slopes
• Mellow slopes
• Open trees
• Steep slopes
• Sunny slopes

The day was:

• Sunny
• Warm

Avalanche conditions

• Whumpfing or drum-like sounds or shooting cracks.

Great day backcountry at Cain West Bowl ski touring - found a very reactive upper snowpack layer which was a soft slab consisting of approximately 15-20cm in depth. The soft slab is relatively new storm snow that is overlying a very thick/supportive melt freeze crust. The skiing was good and the turns were predictable so you didn’t have to ski defensively . We used a snowmobile at lower elevation for access and found the snowmobile conditions challenging based on the limited amount of powder overlying the crust.

We ski’d steep Treeline terrain amd found that although the new powder soft slab snow was reactive on the crust to skier triggering - the soft slab is not dense /consolidated enough to propagate/ we releases many size .5 skier triggered avalanches and despite our attempts we were not able to get anything larger than size .5 to release. No alpine observations undertaken.