Digging snowpits in Rogers Pass

Driving from Castle Mountain towards Lake Louise offered a day off from skiing, a little detour and some shopping at MEC's. I got hold of the sleeping bag I wanted, while Sigbjørn found a couple of new backpack. Lasse had to buy new NTN bindings and learned that his skis are now rotten because of water in the core. We also went touring a place near Canmore with my friend Dave. There we found a few sweet, steep, north facing gullies, with fresh, untracked snow. Then it was time to meet up with our YAMNUSKA course leader in Lake Louise.

Day 1: even though it was blue bird and no wind, day 1 of the course was spent inside with theory. A bummer since we have hade allmost just cloudy weather the whole time in Canada, but still a very learningfull day.

Day 2: After a short breefing of the snow and weather conditions, we headed out aprox. 45 min of Lake Louise. First we did a lot of training with the beacons and probes. Then we hiked up around 300m. We dug a snow pit, and did different compressions tests. There were a couple of surface hoar layers around 20 cm down the snowpack. It was really interresting to see how these weak layers collapsed. At the end of the day Steve put up a scene of an imagined avalanche and we managed to find the three "people" buried in 11 minutes. Even though the time wasn't too bad, we still have a lot to learn and practise.

Day 3: Today we had a longer trip in Loop Brooke in Rogers Pass. We hiked up around 1000m in total, and dug both hasty pits and did biggers tests like a Rutchblock test, with score 6, and an extended comression test. The snowpack here in Rogers Pass is different than in the Rockies (Lake Louise). There were 3 surface hoar layers buried at about 15cm, 25cm and 85cm debth. The tests told ut that in the north facing slopes, below the treeline the layer at 25cm was the most reactive. Around the treeline that layer had probably been affeted by the wind and did not react, while the layer at 15cm was quite unstable. We did not manage to trigger the 85cm layer.