We spent the New Years' week at Fairy Meadows. The first few days were clear and allowed us to travel across the larger glaciers South of the hut. Although travel was easy with ski pen only being around 30cms and Hs of 200 + the crevasses have not bridged at this point. Bridges were unconsolidated throughout. It must be noted that the crevasses in this area are particularly large.
The beginning of the week saw valley cloud both days leading one to suspect a surface hoar problem for the TL/BTL, however, the strong winds that came in with the storm seemed to have beaten that away. We did not see the natural avalanche cycle that was reported in Revelstoke and Golden. We found the mid-December surface hoar down a meter plus but only reactive in the hard range. I suspect this is over 1.5m deep at this point.
The week brought with it over a meter of snow filling in the entire area nicely. I would imagine after this week's snow the area will no longer be in early season condition.
On our flight out we observed the remanence of a small number of natural avalanches to size 2 in the NW-SW facing extreme terrain. This was our first sight of the natural cycle that had been reported earlier in the week by neighboring operations.