Hi,
Yesterday did a guiding job where we skied from Whistler Mountain over the Musical Bumps to Whirlwind Pk and then back again.
WB has now built a cat road to the top of Flute and the ski area boundary was still at Boundary Bowl (nearly under and parallel with Symphony Chair).
Travel on top of the Bumps was easy with Ski Pen being 10-15 cm. Here there was Surface Hoar up to 7mm growing on all aspects.
The Surface Hoar got very small or was not at all beyond Russet Lk.
We past under Fissile’s S aspect during the heat of the day. I did not take a temperature but can say we had to undress to T shirts. Not a snow ball or sluff came off the rocks above. I did not see evidence of recent Natural Avalanches anywhere.
Mid way up the little glacier on Wirlwind I found the height of snow above the ice greater than my 240cm probe. The Nov 25 crust was about 30cm below the surface. Higher up, on a more SW aspect, the snow surface was windblown to expose the hard November 25 crust which almost made skinning difficult.
Downhill ski quality was good. In higher locations wind effect made for grippy variable turns. From 2200m down last Sundays rain (November 30 crust, which is very thin -1cm max and buried under variable amounts of snow) makes for the occasional trippy turn. But the cloudless sky and sun made up for that!
Dave Sarkany
SG