[MCR] Selkirk Mountains, Whitewater Ski area backcountry

Subject: [MCR] Selkirk Mountains, Whitewater Ski area backcountry
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:24:50 -0800
I spent yesterday and today in the Whitewater 'slack-country'. Skied a couple of lines into the Kutetl drainage, east side of Ymir Mountain 'behind' the ski area and a couple into the Five-Mile drainage to the north east of the ski area. The big feature of the last few days has been the temperature inversion. Although upper level temperatures haven't reached the freezing level yet, they were coming close today. Yesterday, the temperatures were steady around -3, today they were closer to -1. The south western slopes are being trashed by the afternoon sun forming a 1-2cm sun crust. Snow melting off the trees has formed thick ice crusts around the tree wells on this aspect as well. We managed to ski down these slopes back to the ski area before the sun went down and everything froze up, so the skiing wasn't too bad.

Another feature of the last few days is surface hoar growth. In sheltered and shaded areas below 2000m the crystals are reaching about 20-25mm in size. This surface hoar and the sun crusts could be a concern when we get some more snow.

The ridge-top winds, which were moderate from the south east at 2200m yesterday, moved down slope overnight. This change stiffened the snow a bit into a thin wind slab on north west aspects, but affected the ski quality only slightly. There were a number of avalanche crowns observed on various aspects. These had run since the last snowfall, but I couldn't tell what layer they had run on. Perhaps the Dec 12 facet layer. The hand shears I did yesterday near the ridge tops where in the moderate to hard range, failing on a facet layer (Dec 12?). There wasn't much snow on top of this layer (20-25cm) in the areas I tested, probably blown off by the wind.

One thing to note are the tree bombs. The snow is still hanging in the trees, and getting denser. These things are getting heavy, so we avoided contact with trees to keep from knocking the bombs on us.

Despite the apparent good stability, we still skied cautiously. We minimized our time on steep open slopes, avoided convex rolls and skied one at a time to islands of safety. In all, we had some excellent skiing.

Play safe and have fun.

Craig Hollinger,
ACMG Assistant Ski Guide.




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