Hart River WInter Road area

Riding quality was:

Good

Snow conditions were:

• Crusty
• Powder

We rode:

• Alpine slopes
• Mellow slopes
• Sunny slopes

We stayed away from:

• Convex slopes
• Steep slopes

The day was:

• Sunny

Avalanche conditions

• Whumpfing or drum-like sounds or shooting cracks.

Skied along the Hart River winter road on Saturday and Sunday, both times in the area close to where the pin is. Snowpack varies a lot with elevation, but is around 60cm deep as soon as you go up from highway level. It can be summed up as: basal facets, crust, facets, crust with 5 to 15cm loose/lightly faceted snow on top. Crusts vary from pencil hard to knife hard, about 5-8cm thick. Impossible to isolate a column in a test pit as it would collapse on the basal facets when cutting the crust. Very weak snowpack, but nothing seemed to propagate.

Just to add to the other reports of the weekend, we did get a significant whumf on a hard slab on a South aspect (~25-30deg) and heard all the facets collapse underneath.

Also, surface hoar grew overnight from about 1500m and above, on all aspects we saw (E, S and W). This had been covered by a very thin layer of snow on Sunday.