Aussie Couloir and Stonecrop Face

Quick report

Weather

warm, windy

Ride Type

mellowSlopes, steepSlopes, alpineSlopes

Stayed Away

convexSlopes

Riding Quality

good

Snow Conditions

powder, windAffected, crusty

Skied Aussie Couloir and Stonecrop Face yesterday Nov 29. Skins on at the Joffre Lakes parking lot with a handpicked trail by lots of foot traffic. Followed summer trail, easy skinning except a few icy spots where the stairs were exposed. ~30-50cm on the ground below the 2nd lake with no base. Challenging to ski down at the end of the day. Lower two lakes not frozen but did skate across the upper lake. Ascended the moraine on lookers left of the Matier glacier and found a bit of cross loading off the moraine itself but nothing once we got in the gully beside the glacier. No recent icefall. Fairly easy trail breaking to the base of the Aussie and then bottop to thigh deep booting to the summit with nearly waist deep for a bit at the pillow near the summit. Looks like couloir flushed well in the last storm cycle. Good skiing down with some powder and a nice firm base. Shot across to Slalok and took the standard route up to the summit. Skied from the summit off the main face and then at the bottom of the ice traversed hard skiers right to get into the slot couloir that is on skiers right of the bottom half of the face. Very cool - ski width wide in some sections. Stonecrop was mostly wind pressed but the apron opened up to nice powder skiing. Good snowpack throughout the day that felt fairly rightsize up and progressively quite dense. We found some small pockets of windslab in lee areas that we were able to kick off with ski cuts but couldn’t get any propagation. Nice to ski some classics!