Today I woke up fairly early with no plans outside of a lazy ski day, maybe at the resort? As I ate breakfast I realized the weather forecast was probably going to be wrong and suddenly decided to head off to Niblock via Divide Creek. Got to the O’Hara parking lot by 7:15 and 5 minutes later I was off to the races to catch as much of the overnight freeze as I could.
I reached the Niblock/Whyte Col in 3 hours, ran over to the summit ridge of Niblock to grab some pictures and then went back for my skis waiting where the snow stopped. The first 50-100m had a nasty crust but soon the snow turned to powder. The run down the glacier was great, there were 4 ski tracks from another day but I couldn’t feel them. Just below the glacier toe I ran into a party of 4 heading up, they reported the lower forest snow to still be frozen and I returned the favour and informed them of the excellent snow they would be skiing in the alpine. The snow continued to provide good turns to about 2000m, I decided to go down the pillow canyon far skier’s left on the exit but there was a bit of a crust here and I decided to leave the pillow jumping for next season. The creek exit was still very icy but at least it wasn’t iso! The road was just starting to break down as I reached it at 11:20am but it still provided good support back to the parking lot.
Great day out there, low winds, some clouds but mostly sunny where I was. There seemed to be a solid haze out towards Banff, I heard the weather was a little different out that way this morning. Still powder out there to be skied but still worth starting and ending early I’d say.
