Finally winter! Back from a week of skiing at Sol Mountain Touring in the Monashees with bluebird-powder for the first 4 days. It was cold with overnight lows of -25C but so long as you stayed on the sunny south facing slopes the daytime temps were fine. The snow was good with boot top pow. On Thursday we got 24cm of new snow. A big powder day just like on our first trip in 2006 when 1.70 meter of snow fell during our week at Sol. But on Friday it warmed up to near freezing and blew hard. Up high the snow was wind hammered and down low it developed a melt freeze crust. Somewhere in the middle was good skiing but we didn't do so well at finding it. On Saturday the weather was nice again so we had a longer tour into the alpine. In the end we didn't quite make the target of 10km vertical over the week but were close. Instead we got to explore some of the alpine scenery we didn’t even see during our first trip when it was snowing almost constantly.
This was a last minute trip and none of our ski friends could come along so we were in there with a 4 other small groups. A photographer/athlete team (crazy skier dudes, I would call them), a group of four from Reno, a guided group of three older guys from the Shushwap and some friends of the hut keeper from Clearwater.
It is a small world. One of the guys coming out from a trip before us was an old paddling buddy of several week-long trips. We also knew one of the Clearwater boys - again a kayaker. (text Peter/Claudia)
More pictures here.
