March Rogers day tours- Soap Box
March has been a hard month for ski touring. The forecast just hasn't been co-operative, so many days of 1-2cm's over the day. So not an big dump where the trees will be refreshed and awesome, not clear high pressure for a few days for things to settle out and get up high on big alpine, just a constant in-between that's good for neither. This is the story of a couple of those days where we were skunked by constant weather.
March 15th, I was looking to ski something out of the resort after the storm passed. The weather looked to be not doing us any favours, so I went up to the pass with a few smaller options in mind. Then all the permit areas were closed due to computer difficulties. So we headed up Glacier Crest through some nasty crust. Close to the top, snow conditions started to improve, the temp crust mostly disappeared and pow became abundant.
After the fog rolled in and killed what was left of the visibility, we thought we had found the top of the S couloir. So we dropped in and skied some pow
Then more pow on the moraines back to the car
We were hoping to combine the S couloir with another ascent to Perley rock but the skiing was only becoming more by braille so we decided against Perley rock as it is a big wide open moraine run.
A week later, and it was time to go to the pass again. The forecast looked like partial sun/cloud. Little did we know. We wanted to do North Bowl or Nikki's Notch on Cheops to get a handle on how things were doing, and then go for STS if it looked good. The wind was blowing like a mother and transporting snow, but things felt good enough to go straight for Nikki's
There were a few strange little wind slabs in Nikki's. They didn't amount to much, but the extra few degrees of steepness on STS and the sheer length of it made us decide against an STS attempt. So we went back up to ski North Bowl. The skin track after Balu Pass was completely filled in by the crossloading snow. North bowl was good fun and better snow than Nikki's
You can also see that STS was self-purging in sluffs all day. So much for our weather window.