Late August, it never disappoints! After a bit of a drought, I had been out of the mountains for a while and was itching to get out. I’ve been really fortunate this summer. My first summer skiing, I was just skiing anything, mellow lines and suncups, whatever snow I could find. Last summer, I made a real effort to ski something reasonably steep and interesting each month, and skied lots of bare ice, as the hot summer dictated. It was good fun though, and an excellent builder of skills. This summer, with just September left to go, I think it’s safe to say things are only going to get better from here on out, and I’ve been successful in ski interesting lines, in good snow each month. No suncups or bare ice comprising the entire line but a white carpet of something reasonably fresh for at least the interesting parts.<\/p>\n
But you didn’t come here to listen to me stroke my ego, so moving on… I saw a nice cold system moving in and gave Matt the heads-up that it might be go time. The system came, a nice healthy east-sloper that was hitting Jasper area a bit harder. I do love skiing something new on every outing, but it was hard to argue against Athabasca. I wasn’t 100% after taking my longest break from the alpine in the last year, so something that’s more giggles than exploration sounded just fine. It turned out Ian was on a little break from work too, so the three of us left Golden around 3. The forecast for the day was all over depending which you believed, all agreed there would be no significant precip, but amount of cloud cover was a big question. We decided we should climb straight up the Silverhorn, so that we would at least have tracks to follow heading down if vis went to total crap.<\/p>\n
Well, vis was total crap all the way up the moraines and onto the glacier. There was perhaps 5cm of snow on the lower glacier, and at least with the heavy cloud there would be negligible effect to the snow from the sun during our time heading up. We more or less followed the tracks of a mountaineering party that was trudging up, we had seen their headlamps near the start of the ice while we were gearing up at the car. Below the ramp route that cuts under Silverhorn, we met up with the group, on their way back down. They said there was a slab on a steeper part of the ramp they didn’t like. We kept on into the muggy whiteness as some token snow started.<\/p>\n