Hi all,

We had a great early season ski touring day on the East Cauldron Glacier up the south fork of Glacier creek in the Purcell Mountains.

We drove to the Jumbo pass trail-head with a high clearance 4x4 vehicle and skied up the South fork road to back end of valley. There was about 35cm of moist snow at the Parking area (1600m), 70cm of snow at 1800m, 160cm at 2400m and 200cm+ at 2800m. We skied smooth north facing glaciers and treeline terrain. there was about 20-30cm of evenly distributed soft snow overlying a firm base. Various snowpack test showed no significant results. The November 13th crust was down 50-60cm and well defined up to 2400m. It was less obvious above.

We saw a recent natural slab avalanche on a steep East facing fan at 2800m below an alpine mixed face, see photo. It looked to be about 100m wide, 150m long and 50-60 cm deep. We suspect it released on the November 13th interface and was caused be a slough from above. Otherwise we did not observed any signs of instability.

All in all, a great early season ski day!

Cheers,

David Lussier
acmg mountain guide
www.summitmountainguides.com