Yet Another Reminder to Play Safe
At this point i'm probably preaching to the choir at this point, but I feel we can never have enough reminders to play safe out there. Yesterday I was ski touring in the Lake Louise area with Idris, my girlfriend and another non maggot and I was caught in a slide (~size 2) while ascending.
I was breaking trail up a normally sheltered and short SW facing couloir to the top of the pass which we were going to descend back to Lake Louise. Unfortunately for the two days before a moderate north wind had been blowing up the ski run and loading a layer of surface hoar and recrystallized facets. The couloir also has a small terminal moraine at the bottom which is quite the terrain trap. The trail breaking was heavy with the snow consisting of a windslab between 10-40cm thickness. A couple friends had ascended the route three days previously and had their tracks had been completely refilled. As I started the ascent I made sure the other three remained at the bottom in a safe zone while I broke trail to the top. I reached about 5m from the top (couloir length ~100m) when I started noticing shooting cracks shooting coming from my tips. Uh oh. The entire couloir broke loose (10m wide) and the crown had a depth of ~10-40cm. I sat down and tried to dig in, but got dragged down 3/4 of the length of the path, well above the moraine, but below the a bunch of rocks that it had dragged me over.
Luckily I emerged relatively unscathed, but have learned a bit of a lesson. The avalanche forecast for the day had called for moderate risk in the alpine (human triggered avalanches possible, natural avalanches unlikely) but warned specifically to watch for slopes which would have been affected by the north wind. duh. We were on SW slope which notches onto a NNE slope. Perfect candidate. I feel like I failed my party for not making the correlation and deciding to ascend that slope.
