A pleasant and civilized day out in the Duffy Lake today with Jim Sandford. Conditions were fantastic and a great time was had save for about 1 hr in the beginning on a steep icy bushwhack where I am pretty sure Jim and I both were wishing to be somewhere different and slightly more pleasant, like maybe N Korea as Denis Rodman. But seriously, this is a great tour up into some big and interesting alpine terrain. We actually did not get to the top of Cassiope itself but settled on a minor summit SSE of it; this was due to routefinding error on our part and given our time constraints (dinner partys, cocktails) we pointed them down slope and got some great skiing in on preserved NW shots.
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| Jim surveying the task at hand |
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| We stopped here for a moment and took a look at... |
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| This. A very widespread natural cycle took place likely last weekend out on the Duffy. Hard to say if it was preserved surface hoar pockets or solar crusts but things had popped out on almost every S, SE aspect up to size 3 with crowns anywhere from 40 to100 (est) cm, maybe more. One slide, appearing to have been initiated by warming rocks propagated close to a km. |
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| Upper glacier. |
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| Jim topping out on our highpoint. |
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| The pine' |
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| Reps go skiing! |
On the way down we got to negotiate a war zone of wet slide trenches, fridge sized debris and more - luckily, we had grown to enjoy suffering early on in the day with the 5th class bushwhacking and the jokes kept flowing all the way to the car.
Cheers!
Ross
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