Went into Garibaldi Park and up Glacier Pikes/Warren Glacier during the last 4 days. Absolutely warm, beautiful, weather as long as we where off (and up) from Garibaldi Lake. On the lake the temps stayed well below zero and a layer of valley fog seems to drift from one end of the lake to another. The lake is its usual slush, snow, ice combo. Good enough traveling.
We accessed the Neve through Table Meadows and Warren Glacier. Low angle easy travel. There is about 1-2 meters of snow on the glacier ice. The icefall looks really thinly covered – almost like it looks in September. I have a picture of the icefall that I will post in a few days when I get my SD card back.
I tried to stay off any avalanche terrain like stuff. We did cross some smaller steep features but only very carefully. We had no settlements and no reaction to ski cutting. Intuitively, at first look, things seem to be stabilizing. The pack is definitely settling – you can even see the many contour of features below the surface, and lots of sluffs have run on S aspects. But on careful viewing I could see faint and now older and filled in fracture lines everywhere. Analytically it is obvious that the Persistent Weak Layer (Dec 6) is still there and barely bridged by a variably thick slab at Tree Line and in the Alpine. It is just not trustable. I felt like I was in a tropical version of the Rockies... Below Tree Line is melting fast to the point of trending to being below avalanche threshold.
S aspects that are steep have lots of sun effect (wet snow and crusts), but N aspects are cool and drying out -really nice snow even well down in Tree Line.
I have been working between Vancouver and Duffey Lk, out pretty much every day since before the holidays and got to say the mountains are desolate. There are so few people out there. It is like 25 years ago. Barely an old track around.... even in the super popular spots.
Dave Sarkany
Ski Guide