[MCR] Coast Range - Garibaldi Neve - April 25th to May 1st

[Public Mountain Conditions Report]

Chris Lawrence and I returned today (Sunday) from guiding a
ski mountaineering course for 7 days on the Garibaldi Neve. We started from
Rubble Creek April 25th and ended at Diamond Head May 1st.

 

Access

The road is not plowed to the summer parking lot at Rubble
Creek. We parked at the winter plowing line marked on the Garibaldi Park map.
We were able to skin up to the summer parking lot, then boot packed up patchy
snow to around 800m elevation where we put on our skis. Garibaldi Lake was
still very frozen, with no indication of any problems crossing it soon. At
Rubble Creek, two of our 3 cars were found with smashed windows and stolen gear
on return (including my 1L tub of vegemite!).  Skiing out to the Diamond Head parking lot was well covered.

 

New Snow

New storm snow was observed from 20-35cm depending on
elevation and aspect.

 

Avalanches

No significant avalanches were observed. Our main concern was
wind slabs near ridge top as we encountered strong winds on Wednesday April 27th
from the South, then switching to West overnight. These were observed up to
70cm deep. The sun did not have much effect on the snowpack during the week.

 

Glaciers

Glaciers were well generally well covered, with 300cm probed
at the toe of the Sphinx Glacier. The bergshrund on Mt Garibaldi’s NE Face was
very large. We opted to cross it on the climbers left due to concerns with wind
slabs on the right. While skiing down over the bergshrund, I ski cut a small
size 1 wind slab that was enough to break the bridge and further open up the
bergshrund.

 

Snow conditions

Snow was still wintery above 2200m on northerly aspects on
April 29th. By May 1st we found a supportable crust below
the Elfin Shelter that was beginning to soften, so I would expect corn skiing
can now be found.



Alex Geary (ACMG Assistant Ski Guide, Assistant Rock Guide)

Chris Lawrence (ACMG Mountain Guide)


 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/mcr/attachments/20110502/065902cd/attachment.html>