[MCR] Rockies: Mt Columbia

[Public Mountain Conditions Report]

We climbed Mt Columbia via the normal east face route yesterday, May 7. It is still wintry up there with overnight lows of -8.5 but with strong solar warming on sun exposed slopes. 

Travel conditions are good on variable surfaces varying from bulletproof to breakable to soft crusts. Coverage on the Athabasca Glacier is better than I've seen for years, with 2+ m of winter snow on the ramp onto the icefield where it is often quite thin. This snow is on old firn snow. That said, rest assured that the entire upper glacier is littered with crevasses big enough to swallow a mid-sized SUV and using the rope is de rigueur. 

The seracs off both the Andromeda and Snow Dome sides are active.

On the peak itself the snow has not set up very hard yet and there is fairly deep foot penetration. On the way down in the afternoon the surface layers were getting moist and we were potholing. I was glad that it wasn't any warmer.

On the way down today we saw there had been a slab avalanche off the steepest pitch of the Skyladder on Andromeda and we suspect it may have been triggered by two climbers we saw on Sunday May 6. This slab failed on the ice, so there isn't much skiing left on that line now.

On the drive home we noticed several recent large slab avalanches that failed near the ground on steep west facing terrain around the Columbia Icefields and Bow Summit.

Mark Klassen
ACMG/IFMGA Mountain Guide


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