Brent Kearney

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.

The trail crews at Sunshine have been busy every night, pouring cement on the runs around the resort. For the past couple of weeks, spring has been creeping up on the local resorts, and the rocks are starting to sprout up through the crusty snow. As usual however, there are still some sweet spots to be found. Today I found some decent soft snow underneath the Teepee-Town chair, including The Shoulder. Riding that chair is like aging at 5-times the regular rate, but its still better than chattering around on the crust. Watch out for the rocks though, they are popping up here and there. If you go to the shoulder, take the lowest route in that you can find — up top are roots and rocks with little room to maneuver.

Its amazing how much terrain that you can cover in a morning at Sunshine. We started off yesterday by skinning out to Wawa Ridge. The travel conditions were good, but the snow at the ridge was very skied out from the past few days, with a mixed condition sun crust that was quite difficult to ski.

Back to the subject of massive terrain, from wawa I took a photo of the Delirium Dive area, and then from Delirium Dive took a photo of Wawa, to illustrate how much area we covered in only 3 hours. The red squares in the photos indicate the locations from which I took the shots. Here is Delirium Dive, shot from Wawa Ridge:

The conditions in the Dive were pretty good in general, considering the lack of snow over the past few days. There was about 15cm of loose snow at the very top, then some difficult crust closer to the first set of rock-bands, followed by packed powder that made for some nice turns. We took a skier’s right at the bottom and skied Fat Boy, where there was about 20cm of nice loose snow on top of a soft crust; IMO the best skiing in the whole area.

Here is Wawa Ridge, as seen from the top of Galaxy 1 chute in Delirium Dive; the red square indicates the area that the above shot was taken from:

The Wawa-Delirium circuit provides a nice little mini-adventure that, with the appropriate gear, can be easily covered in a morning.

It was a particularly gorgeous morning at Lake Louise yesterday. With clouds flowing low through the Bow Valley like a river, the upper elevations at the resort had breath-taking views:

There was 5-10cm of new snow, which had formed a surface hoar that made for fantastic skiing. The places to be, IMO, were in the back-bowls, A-H gullies. However, even the often-icey front-side offered packed powder and pockets of loose snow, so it was generally good all-around.

It was a fantastic morning at Sunshine Village, with boot-high pockets of powder to be found hiding in the glades and between mogules on Goat’s Eye Mountain. The official snow report says 5cm of fresh, but its been snowing since Tuesday afternoon, and it was still coming down at a decent rate all morning, so each run was better than the last. If it keeps dumping like this, Friday will be great too.

Today is a powder day at Sunshine Villiage! Yesterday it began to snow in the morning, and by the late afternoon it was approaching white-out conditions in the alpine. There was a dump alert this morning, as Sunshine reported 17cm of fresh pow. Although I have way too much work to do today to ski, I can see from their live webcams that its still coming down up there, despite the warm weather in Banff today. There is more snow in the forecast, and I bet that tomorrow will be another epic powder day at The ‘Shine!