Hiding from the wind

With a desire to shelter from the strong winds and find some soft snow we headed to tree line on Helen's Ridge and found great riding in the open glades. The upper snow pack feels hollow when trail breaking with a widespread 25cm thick soft slab sitting over 10-15cm of low density facets above the Nov12 crust. Ski pen was around 50cm which made for wallowing trail breaking. Shooting cracks in steep terrain and some recent skier triggered size 1.5 avalanches on steep open slopes kept us skiing short pitches on lower angle terrain out of the wind.