Flower Bowl and Couloir

Quick report

Weather

cold, windy, cloudy

Ride Type

steepSlopes, alpineSlopes

Stayed Away

convexSlopes

Riding Quality

good

Snow Conditions

hard, deepPowder, windAffected, powder

Today our group of three skied the flower stem, and a line on the left hand side of the bowl. on the way up to treeline the rain crust is very evident. once we got to treeline we followed the ridge to the south shoulder where it was very windy, there was a hard wind slab developed here that was difficult to break through. we traveresed one at a time towards the southern chute. once we got away from the shoulder we experienced almost no wind and the snow had changed back to soft powder with no slab or raincrust (at about 2500m), so we decided to go check out the stem. boot packing up the stem coulouir we experienced deep powder on top of scree and some old snow near the top which seemed to be bonded well. the last 5m or so on the exit, where the was a slight wind slab developing on the surface (1-1.5cm). overall we we very happy with the snow, so we continued to check out a line on the left side of the bowl. Varialble snowpack in the bowl, on our skin up we noticed significant wind slab development on thin snow on the lookers left. The middle section of our track was soft poweder on top of scree or neve which was sticking very nicely, the right side also had some wind affected snow with a deeper snowpack. near the top of our line the entire snow pack became more and more dense, but not slabby untill just below the ridge. once we reached this obviously wind affected zone we hiked up the scree on the right to the ridge for lunch and tea. we experienced absolutly no wind on the ridge or in the bowl the whole day. on our way down we walked on the scree past the wind slab at the top, then stuck to our 20m corridor of powder in the middle away from wind affect. At the top of the couloir we took skis off for the 2 or 3 meters of super narrow entrance which was on thin snow. skiing the couloir we brought down a decent amount of loose dry sluff. there were a few big rocks in the narrowest section that we were able to get around alright. once it opened up the bottom section was dreamy.