We did a snow skills / companion rescue day today as part of an AST2 course at the fire break in Kootenay National Park just a few km south of the Divide Parking after crossing onto the BC side. The fire break looked almost like a ski hill as could be expected after the weekend.

We practiced various sheer tests on a short 30 degree slope at around 1900m facing NW and to uor surprise found a surface hoar interface (suspect Dec 7) 50cm down very well preserved to 15 mm in the pit wall, producing very easy compression tests sudden collapse (drop when cutting the column), easy to moderate extended column tests and impressive results on the propagation saw tests. We saw another, less pronounced surface hoar layer above (35 cm down). The layer seems spotty and may fall victim to the rapid loading that is currently happening in form of a natural avalanche cycle. Snow started around mid-day and it snowed heavily since here in Canmore.