having been Back in Canada for 22day I finaly got to go play in the big hills. I met my friend Brian at Rogers pass for a day of skiing. The avy report indicated three weak layers to watch for. One at 30cm with the resent storm snow sitting on it, another at 40cm’s and a hoar frost layer at 55cm’s.

We took our time on the up track. Stopping often to talk, catching up on the last 8 months of our lives. Once we gained elevation we dug a pit. Sure enough the shear test gave way easily at 30cms. A medium result on the 40cm layer and way too easy to make one feel safe on the 55cm. I did a Compression test just to gather more data and practice. Though the lower layers were holding out better in the compression, the top 30cm gave way quite easy (two taps from the wrist, clean plainer fracture). No real surprise there, from the out set we had not expected to be riding any big features.

Neither of us had ridden the shoulder we were on, and had no real idea what was below us. Visibility was shit and we could not see the other side of the valley to place our selves. Brian dropped in first. Making a hand full of turns through the glade and stopping behind a big tree 15m to the skiers right of the gully we were following. He was sinking in past his knees and a large body of slough was coming down with him.

I knew I was going to have to carry speed to stay on top of all the unconsolidated fresh snow. I dropped in from the left side, made about two turns before realizing the there was a steep roll in front of me, edged by a band of rock. Hard heal side turn to try and traverse. As I did my feet were taken out from under by a large stream of slough. Oh Shit!, I was trying hard to get an edge in as snow billowed over my shoulders and kept pushing me down the slope. The only chance I had to get out of this was to point it fall line, but with the rocks bellow, that was not going to happen. Finally the wall of snow passed me and I was able to stop. Shaken I stood up and had a look around. I was maybe 5 meters from the rocks with no way through.

Brian yelled up at me. ‘Are you OK’
‘Yep’
‘nice slide’
‘what a fucking idiot’
‘shit man that slid right to the bottom’

I quickly switched my Split Board to ski mode and made the traverse across the gully to Brian. On the way across I noticed that the snow had sloughed away on a much harder layer then we noticed in out pit. This gully had slid recently. Sure enough the whole glade as far as I could see had slid to a depth of about 20cms. The starting point was about 20m wide and gained from there. We regrouped and I switched back to board mode and tried to calm down a bit.

‘sorry man, that was bad, really fucking bad’
Brian just smiled and shrugged it off. ‘I thought I was going to be digging you out of the washer’

After the slide the gully was pretty run out and felt safe, so we crossed it yet again, as we now noticed a choke at the bottom and wanted to get into the trees to the left. But once we got down and over we noticed that were pretty much cliffed out on all sides. The only way out was down this 70m long, 1 1/2m wide throat.

Brian went first, and though I could not see him, he took off his skis and bum slid down the hard packed avy path. Then I went, doing pretty much the same thing.

‘That was the dumbest fucking thing I have ever done’ I said once I met him at the bottom.
‘Yeah man, lets get out of here.’

So we called it a day and skied back to the Rogers pass info centre with our tails between our legs.

Don’t do this at home, or any where else.