Just back from a week at Vista Lodge in the Selkirks. One of the outgoing skiers said "It's a bit touchy, eh".
First afternoon, after the heli flight in. Noodled around on low angle south facing slopes for a bit, got impressive collapses and reactive pits. Went around to some NE faces, and things seemed different, no collapses. Layer on a windcrust was non reactive at the top of this slope, so we thought we'd give it a try on this small slope. I was the second skier, it popped at a spot where I was literally 1' away from the first skier's track. Slow moving enough that I never would have known it slid except for my partner yelling at me. Went back up and did an ECT on the crown where it was deepest (60cm), and got no results.
A few minutes later, we got to this rollover. First skier ski cut it and most of the small slope slid. The next 3 skiers each knocked out a little more.
After a few successful days our courage was building back up, and we headed down valley for these slopes. Dug full pits a couple times, and did numerous hand shears on the way up. Looking for surface hoar that we had found occasionally in other places. In only one hand shear did we find any. Did two runs on the lookers left side, great skiing. Third run we traversed over the ridge to the right and skied from a slightly lower col. A hand shear in this vicinity did reveal a reactive SH layer, but we were at the lowest angle spot on the ridge and it was 5pm. Decided to go ahead and ski it. When we got to the bottom, we could see that while traversing the ridge we had remote triggered a D2 slide that took out some of our tracks from our second run.
This probably was more avalanche activity than I've first hand encountered than in my previous 35 years of backcountry skiing. Maybe for many of you it's no big deal, but it meant enough to me to post. Flame away, or add your insights.
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