Conditions Report
Report from Sunday March 11, 2024
The backcountry at Whitewater, British Columbia, delivered cold smoke again on Sunday. Expectations were low in the morning when the car was getting loaded. Although it looked like it had snowed roughly to the belt buckle of the Viking gnome on the snow stake at Whitewater, the reports from the day before weren’t that amazing. However, there was always a chance the wind had loaded lee features again, as it had before. On arriving at the lodge at 9:00 a.m., a little later than usual due to daylight savings time shortening the sleep, the car park was almost full. A surprise, due to the seeming lack of snow.
After picking up scones and muffins from the coffee shop, and booting up, the four of us made our way to the Summit Lift. From there the plan was to ski over to the Powder Keg skin up. This designated skin track leads you to the Powder Keg Ridge, famous for hosting the yearly Cold Smoke Freeride competition. There is another option, a boot pack named the “Fish Ladder”, which takes you to the ridge as well. When we arrived at the place to transition to skins, we found the skin track had filled in since one of our group had put it in the day before. This boded well for the day.
The group had decided to head for Prospector Bowl, around a 30-minute skin from the resort, a backcountry zone that feeds back down to the lodge via a few different options. We found ourselves breaking trail in four to five inches of powder on the southern side of Gopher Butte. Travel was pretty easy, but the wind certainly got up as we reached the ridge. We looked down Halloween Chute, and in a decision we’d regret a little on our second lap, decided to skip it, aiming for the treed section of the bowl on a north-easterly aspect. Having bumped into a couple of patrollers checking on their avalanche start zones, we transitioned and dropped in. It only took two turns before the decision was made to do another lap.
The second run was more of the same, with a small disappointment: by the time we got back up to the ridge again, Halloween Chute had been skied. However, our skin track along the ridge had obviously not been used, so we pushed a little further skiers left of our tracks, and got the goods once again.
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Snow Conditions
