May 21 - Bonus Report for May Showers!

Hi Everyone! We’ve wrapped up our regular newsletter for the season but we haven’t given up skiing! May showers bring good pow!

Where we’ve been skiing:

Eric is back from skiing in the Alaska Range and been poking around the Sea to Sky. Evan has been down in the Mt Baker area. This time of year is definitely harder to plan for but we can look for a few specific things to get good skiing:

1. Areas you can drive/hike high to snow. With the snow line going up, it’s like early season so driving high is nice. Around Squamish the skiable snow line is now around 1300-1400m. We drove high on the Cat Lake Road branch to get to Brohm.
2. Watch for cool unsettled weather where it rains in the valley. If the freezing level is 1500-2000m, you’re psyched. Ideally a clear night and morning are the window to get after it and find some pow. Multiple clear days in a row generally mean firmer conditions as the pow will settle and melt quickly. Good for travel but not the best pow turns.
3. If there is more extended high pressure and clear days, look for the corn skiing! Solar aspects will ski better once you’ve given them time to soften up. Safer and more fun!

Nch’Kay (Mt. Garibaldi) is currently in great shape. Glacier coverage is good with small sags starting to show but no openings throughout the route. Kulshan and Tahoma (Mt Baker and Mt Rainier) are getting plenty of traffic along with the rest of the volcanos. On Kulshan, there’s a bit of hiking (10min on the south side and 60min on the north side) to access snow but all the parking areas are accessible. With snowpack over 2.5 meters, it’s quite wintery in the high alpine this week and lots of snow in the forecast.

Send us a message if you’d like some help getting in a few last big ski missions!

Summer adventures:

We’ve got a few things up our sleeves for summer adventures this year. One is particularly exciting…

Eric is looking for folks to join him August 26-30th up at Whitecap Alpine Lodge for a run and hike adventure! Our lead guide is Christine Feleki, an ACMG guide and all around awesome human!

We’re looking for folks that are excited for some mountain running and scrambling in the peaks north of Pemberton. There will be three guides leading different pace groups from the hikers to the chargers.

Everything is taken care of for this summer dream trip - helicopter flight from Pemberton, world class food, lodging at Whitecap, saunas, and more! From August 26 to 30th. We can promise 4 days of excellent adventures that you won't get at the valley bottom :)

Summer scrambling season is coming fast!

Despite the relatively cold and wet spring we’re having, it’s still been a very low snowpack year. This means that as the snow line creeps up, we’re going to have unusually early access to summer scrambling. Already the snow line is approaching the tops of our logging roads!

I’m expecting that some of the lower elevation scrambles will already start coming into shape in the next 2-3 weeks.

• Sky Pilot is one of my early season favourites with the great boot ski back down the trail.
• The Tantalus area is always high in my mind and while prime season is usually mid to late July, I’m expecting that to be quite a bit earlier this year. I think I’ll be poking up there by early to mid June with prime season for last week of June/first week of July.

All this is speculation of course but it’s always interesting to forecast conditions and see what comes of it!

Do you have some summer adventures you’d like to tick off the list this year? We can help you get up in the Tantalus, climb that route on the Chief, or run that rad ridge. Send us a message with what you’d like to do!