| My group of 5 and I went 10 rounds with this traverse April 14-23, starting at the Alexandra River and finishing at Bow Lake. Overall it felt like we battled it to a draw.
We had some significant weather early on in the trip, the most notable being a wind storm all day April 16 that saw westerly winds at 60-70 kph (hard to stand up) at the 2100m level on the Alexandra Glacier. Then the night of the 16th-17th saw 10-15 cm of snow fall with more moderate winds. These two events formed hard wind slabs 20-50 cm thick that lay atop a hard melt-freeze crust from the strong winds, and these were buried by a 20-50cm thick soft slab from the snowfall. There were easy, sudden planar shears on the melt-freeze crust. This all caused tricky tracksetting to enable us to get up the upper Alexandra Glacier and a couple days later we opted to avoid the steep, north facing Niverville Col because of these slab problems (we went down Forbes Creek to the Freshfield Glacier instead).
On the 20th we started getting into better weather with blueing skies and warmer temps and lots of UV radiation (the first day with no snow or wind and good vis all day was the 21st). This settled the snowpack some although we still saw recent slab avalanches on alpine north and east aspects on the 21st, about 50 cm thick, wide propagations, size 2.
By the time we crossed the Wapta yesterday things definitely felt more springlike with crusts forming on solar aspects although the crusts were generally breakable (another day or two and that will probably change for the better). The north aspects seemed well settled although they were staying dry with some good powder skiing to be had. I wonder if less snow and wind occurred on the Wapta than we had seen further north.
Yesterday wet loose snow avalanches to size 2 were occurring by 9.30 am on steep, rocky solar aspects in the alpine.
All creeks are open, wading required. Mark Klassen Mountain Guide
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