McDermott mission

Quick report

Weather

sunny, windy, cloudy

Ride Type

convexSlopes, steepSlopes, sunnySlopes, openTrees, alpineSlopes, mellowSlopes

Riding Quality

amazing

Snow Conditions

powder

Avalanche Conditions

avalancheConditionSlab, avalancheConditionSnow

We spent three days in McDermott bowl in a large group of 11. Half accessing through Tunnel Creek, half sledding in from Galloway. We arrived on Friday 25th and left on Sunday 27th. Splitting up we covered a lot of ground. We found 10-15cm of soft snow already on the ground, and flurries through the day Friday added up to 5-10cm of super light snow by Saturday morning. Wind transported this around A LOT ending up with up to 30-35cm of snow drifting on lower elevation more sheltered spots at and below tree line. Lee alpine features saw a lot of deposition too. Changeable winds meant ‘Lee’ was somewhat unpredictable, but the main trend seemed to come from between SW and SE. We saw a lot of natural activity on the east face of Mt Mcdermod up to size 2.5, seemingly caused by wind loading, with two large crowns on this face and debris running from the Mcdermod couloirs. We scoped a north facing line at around 2000m and backed off after finding the storms now not bonding well, and then a surface hoar layer 50-60cm down which gave a sudden planar result at 14 hits in a column test. Extended column took 20 hits to react but did not propagate all the way across the column. Failure was planar. We rode several lines down a NE slope from 2000m dropping in to Mercury Bowl between Don’s Revenge and Captain Crunch with open trees, finding good snow improving in quality as elevation reduced to the bottom of the bowl. Later that day (saturday) we rode a wide, open, steep NW face off of a shoulder of Plantery Peak with and saw significant point releases up to size 1 in the new snow. Sunday dawned significantly warmer and windier, we saw much more wind slab formation and some delightful freezing rain style snow sticking to us around 1800m as we made a beeline for the car via Tunnel Creek. Ski tracks from the day before had set to concrete below 1700m suggesting it had been super warm lower down on Saturday. Heads up - two more cars had their fuel tanks drilled and drained at the Tunnel Creek parking at some point Saturday night.