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