[MCR] Waddington conditions

Subject: [MCR] Waddington conditions
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:30:02 -0700
Just came out from a quick one week trip to the South side of Waddington to the Dias Glacier area. Other than the ski quality the area around the regular base-camp on the Dias is in good shape.
        
From the limited probing that I did on the Franklin, Finality and Angel glacier there is well over 3m in the area. Having said this though, there is widespread evidence of an extreme wind event in the past few weeks which has stripped much snow off ridge tops and made snow conditions on north faces, bullet proof!

We managed to be in the area right when most snow surfaces were going though its first transition into a spring snow cycle. This meant that we used ski crampons on almost all of our travel however the snow never really turned into a skiable form of corn snow due to the powder like conditions underneath. On most days this meant we were rewarded with a beautiful breakable crust or schmoo for skiing.

We did mange to bag the false summit of the NW peak of Waddington in our short stay. In my 15 years of skiing in the area I have never seen the Angle glacier in such difficult conditions. The Seracs have become very active and personally are almost a bit much for a ski route. The attached photo is from our flight into the area on the evening of the 14th, however when we climbed up there two days later there had been a serac fall from high on the glacier in the center. This large icefall did not cause any real avalanche, but it did leave a 2-3m deep trench down the entire glacier and left debris field 30-40m wide.

Also of note the NW summit of Waddington was also in difficult conditions with mostly blue ice and two near vertical steps just below the summit. Defiantly not skiable as it usually is at this time of the year. Ski and boot crampons were a must for our whole route up from the Dias as would be a few more ice screws and a real ice axe and crampons for the NW summit.

With a forecast of warming temps and poor weather we headed out a few days earlier than planed. I'd bet with the warm temps there would be bit of an avalanche cycle going right now until the temps cooled off again.


Craig McGee, Mountain guide.
Whistler BC
craigskibum@xxxxxxxxx

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