[MCR] Tryst Lake Chutes - Kananaskis

Hey all,

Up to Tryst Lake Chutes with Jason Billing yesterday. Great ski quality and hardly anybody there with us. We skied 4 of the lines there working from skiers left to right. Stability tests above the steepest lines there were showing a broken shear down ~25cm's, and a very resistant, planar shear down 55cm. Both were windslab layers and both were failing in the upper end of moderate or the low end of hard in our tests. For the most part the area seems as though it remained sheltered from the most recent wind events with minimal affect.

For us, the character of the shears was enough to keep us from hoping into the steepest line right away, we worked out way in from the lower angle lines to skiers left. But having done that felt pretty confident when we were skiing the steepest stuff.

Skied around to take a look at the Super Slope as well, but gave it a miss as the feature has been significantly wind effected. At best it would have been lousy skiing, but probably a lot worse than that.

1 ski-cut produced a loose  sz. 1.5, that ran down the length of the steepest line stopping just above the lake. No other avalanche observations, but having said that thin cloud made visibility poor for most of the day and hard to see much of the alpine surrounding us.

The gully on the ski out was good for a couple hundred meters of descent below the lake, but below that the snowpack thinned, opening up the creek in the bottom of the drainage and making it a bit of a thrash to get out of the timber and back to the car.

Have a great weekend.

Mike Trehearne

Alpine Guide & Apprentice Ski Guide

Cloud Nine Guides

Check out:

www.facebook.com/cloudnineguides
or email:

mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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