[MCR] Whitewater backcountry - Nelson, BC

[Public Mountain Conditions Report]

Some obs from the past couple days:
 
13cm of new snow that fell Tues. night / Wed. morning is still providing
excellent skiing in wind sheltered areas at treeline and below.  A reverse
wind loading pattern had compressed the snow on N-NW aspects and reduced
cornices somewhat, but yesterday winds were back to a SW flow affecting
alpine elevations.  
 
I saw a fair bit of terrain the last couple days and observed some sluffing
on steeps from the new snow and a few small wet surface sluffs from sun
effect on steep south aspects but no slabs were visible.
 
The warm temps of last week have really settled out the snowpack with
settlement cracks on all the trees.  This, combined with cooler present
temps (-7C yesterday in the parking lot at 10am) had stiffened things up
quite a bit.  I had variable clean shears on the new windslab (10-20cm) with
moderate to hard results but it generally seemed to be bonding well.  I
would be leery of cross loaded slopes though and the better skiing is off of
the windslab anyway.
 
Snow depths were averaging 170-190cm above 1900m although shallow areas
still exist (especially where wind effected).
 
Surface hoar was growing with crystals 3-7mm observed at treeline ridgetops.
 
The resort will open tomorrow with excellent skiing to be had.
 

 
More photos at www.facebook.com/mountainsense
 
Cheers,
Shaun King  ACMG / UIAGM Mountain Guide
Mountain Sense Guiding & Instruction
www.mountainsense.ca <http://www.mountainsense.ca/>   +1-250-505-5139
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/mcr/attachments/20111202/d65ac4f6/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 91662 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/mcr/attachments/20111202/d65ac4f6/attachment-0001.jpe>