Steep creek branch 2

Quick report

Weather

cloudy, warm, wet

Ride Type

cutBlocks, denseTrees, openTrees

Stayed Away

steepSlopes

Riding Quality

terrible

Snow Conditions

heavy, wet

Avalanche Conditions

avalancheConditionSnow, avalancheConditionTemp

The day started off hopeful, as we skinned up from Duffy lake we observed a thin and breakable icy crust over a large amount of dry powder from the recent storm this week. It was about -4°C when we left the car, but as we neared the end of the road and entered a cut block, we started to notice significant warming. Within only a couple hours the temperatures rose to around 2°C and the snow became increasingly heavy and sticky. We had ambitions to at least reach the ridge, but it soon started raining and snow conditions deteriorated rapidly. We began seeing lots of very large rollers as we skinned, and decided to turn around when one of us released a fairly large slabby block that slid right from ground level and travelled a couple feet. We didn’t notice anything else release and the slope was low angle, but we made the call that going any higher would be unsafe for our party. We have suspicions that there was some kind of temperature inversion, since as we descended the Duffy back to Pemberton, we noticed snow on the trees again and temps back down to -2°C.