October Powder - MRNP - 10.2.09

Prologue - For those of you who don't care, scroll down to the story.  However, I wanted to share a revelation I had recently.  After 35 mo. of consecutive turns, I purposefully let my streak end.  Although I will probably still ski almost every month of the year, this summer I realized that the pursuit of other interests is just too much as well.  As my friends and I clean up a new climbing area we're working on and the fall swells have delivered some of the best waves I've surfed, I realized that sometimes I just couldn't squeeze it all in.  But more importantly I had to realize that was okay.  So, I hope I can still post some tr's up on here, even though I'm no longer going to dedicate myself earning turns all year. 

Story - The rapidly dropping freezing level had me stoked.  I knew there would be a little bit of snow...but how much?  Telemetry doesn't really reveal much for the north side of the mountain.  However, experience has told me that usually one can get a nice rain shadow effect and that Echo rock usually acts as a gathering area for blowing pow.

Entering the Mowich lot, we quickly parked and began to ascend to snow.



Arriving at the Flett Glacier (or I guess one can call it a snowfield moreso) we decided to climb up and over to the Russell.  Althoguh the Russell didn't look like it was worth venturing onto, the Flett was able to provide us with enough bluebird, powder and glacial caves to make the trek in worth it.









A semi-hard crust (of only about a half-inch of depth) existed upon some very granualr and heavier snow.  Had it been a buried layer in a mid-winter snowpack it might have been of some concern.  But at this point in time it filled in the suncups perfectly to make a nice smooth surface of which about 3" of amazingly light powder had fallen and was asking to be skied.  We obliged, and after a slough of laps, we retired to doing what any other bc skier/splitboarder would do...we went to explore the glacial cave at the bottom of the Flett.