I spent the last 6 days (Mar. 22-27th) skiing in the North Cariboo Mountains outside McBride, BC guiding for Robson Backcountry Adventures. The week started off with cool temperatures, moderate SE winds and unsettled weather with 15-30cms of new snow (mostly falling on Friday the 21st). A warming trend began on Monday, peaking mid-day on Wednesday with freezing levels reaching 3,000m. Winds were calm, skies overcast and only a few cms of snow fell during that time (no rain). Thursday showed a significant cooling with 10-15cms of new snow.

Avalanche conditions overall were excellent. There was one sz2 cornice-triggered windslab avalanche observed right below ridge crest on a N-facing ALP feature (see "pointing"photo), likely failing Monday afternoon when we observed moderate wind transport throughout the day. We started the week out cautiously, not knowing how reactive the Feb. drought and Mar. 8 layers would be as well as windslabs, but soon pulled persistent slabs out of our avalanche problems and only had windslabs possible on lee slopes in the ALP directly below ridgecrest. The big warm up on Wednesday had us stepping back as we observed significant snowballing/pinwheeling on all aspects and elevations. Moist snow was found in the top 5cms throughout the ALP and over 30cms down at BTL. Surprisingly, no avalanche activity was observed that day.

Throughout the week, we skied from 1300-2400m on all aspects up to 40 degrees. HS remained around 200cm at TL with 300+cm on the glacier. Below 1900m on Wednesday afternoon, and below 1500m on Thursday, the snow became unskiable due to warm temperatures. Outside of that, snow conditions were excellent all week with a lot of happy faces and everyone having the "ski jitters." Happy spring skiing everyone!