After finally escaping my foot bandages, it's been off into the backcountry for some skiing. The past week or so has involved several days of uphill and downhill in some pretty decent snow.
Stu and I spent 2 days up at the ski cabin and put in a few good lines down through the trees into some nice snowy bowls. We did dig one snow pit and discovered a weak layer, so we weren't all that surprised when Stu cut one line across the top of a slope that caused a fracture and a slide of snow right to the bottom of the hill.
A few days ago, a friend from Calgary arrived to learn something about Kootenay skiing, so we headed up the the ski cabin again. For at least part of the time, there was light snow, so by the end of 3 days, the upper layers were sliding all over the place. Because of this, our ski lines were pretty conservative and in the trees. It was interesting to watch slopes sliding on the track back out as the skidoo passed. Probably explains why the avalanche hazard was raised to high....
Down at valley bottom, snow is slowly disappearing, but at 2000 m it's still deep and fluffy. I'm a bit conflicted, wanting spring and warmer, sunnier weather, but still enjoying the turns on the slopes. Maybe after a couple days of rest I'll try out some XC skiing this weekend.
A pretty clear example of the benefits of skiing in the sub-alpine in this part of the country. What you see is the fog and cloud layer that has hovered over the Kootenay Lake valley for weeks. A few of us were at the ski club's cabin at 2000 m for 2 days and this is the view we had for at least one of those days...before the real clouds and snow moved in. The snow was in pretty good condition so we had a few nice runs and got our exercise climbing back out of the valleys that we had skied into.
