For the past week or so, temperatures have been climbing and snow has been turning to slush in the Banff/Lake Louise area. This weekend, it was 8 degrees Celsius at Lake Louise. The snow conditions are very good, for spring, with about 1.5m of snow base left. Early Saturday morning it was super crusty, but by 10:00am it had softened up to provide great ski conditions at Lake Louise. The resort is mostly empty, too, so there are no line-ups anywhere. Its warm enough that the resort is hosting live music on the patio at Kokanee Cabin, making an excellent apres-ski atmosphere on sunny afternoons.
From what I’ve heard, Norquay is pretty much finished for the season, with only a couple of runs remaining open. Sunshine and Lake Louise have only closed a couple of runs each, with both resorts offering over 100 runs to its sparse population of spring skiers. I’ve heard that the snow in the backcountry is excellent, but avalanche dangers are fairly high, depending on the microclimate and underlying terrain.
