Decided to leave the deep freeze and facets behind in the Rockies and come out here to ski some real snow for the Xmas/NY break and have not been disappointed! Yesterday we toured up White Queen and dropped off the north side into the white room. After a few turns in slightly wind pressed snow we found nice boot deep all the way down into what I'll call "Beattie Bowl", for lack of a better term. After that, we hiked up towards the summit of Beattie proper and dropped a nice line down to 5 mile creek through nice trees and rock gardens. Conditions were generally pretty good but were surprised to find a buried (5cm) temperature crust about half way down that persisted almost to valley bottom, which made things a bit interesting at times. Made a long climb back up to the pass and enjoyed a quick shuss back to the truck by 4:30 in rapidly diminishing photons (the sun does go down early out here!!).
There was one other vehicle left in the Hummingbird parking lot as we started our engine and I remember mentioning that I hoped they had headlights for the return ski (we didn't see any when we looked back at the pass, but not knowing the area we thought perhaps some folks were winter camping back in the hills somewhere). Anyway, when we returned for a second helping this morning we found the Nelson SAR team out in full force! Turns out that the people who owned vehicle we saw were a couple from AB and the poor people spent the night out in cold somewhere. We shared what information we had about tracks we'd seen the previous day and dialed into their search frequency on my vhf to monitor the search. Luckily, about an hour or so later, the first team made contact with the subjects. They were understandably tired but otherwise okay and made it out under their own power to hummingbird pass. It made for interesting listening as we explored varied terrain around Beattie.
Some learnings from a non-local; the terrain here can be quite complicated once you leave the beaten track especially when you don't (or can't) form a mental picture of the geography due to cloud cover or weather. We made frequent use of GPS and topo map to keep a firm picture of where we were, and even then it was easy to get turned around once or twice. I can easily see how others, new to the area could get confused and wander off into a potentially nasty situation.
Anyway, enough of that, the skiing around Beattie was lot of fun. That slightly buried temperature/sun crust kept rearing it's crunchy head though - it seems to be the worst below about 1500m but diminished once you neared the valley floor (cold air drainage?). HS varied from 170 to 200, had no wumphing but did have the occasional shooting crack on kick turns. Things will get interesting when the next big dump hits.
Couple of other comments: all the folks we've met here have been SUPER friendly. So nice to be in a hospitable environment again after some of the crap we have to put up with in Calgary. The SAR team you have out here is top-rate. One certainly never hopes to be in a situation where you need a rescue, but if you do, you'd sure want these folks looking for you!
ps: apologies, in advance, if I messed up any of the place names or references :-)
