Evening Ridge Trees

This has been a funny month in the Kootenays. April hasn't quite decided if it's going to be winter or spring yet. One day it'll be sunny, hot and 70 degrees (20 Celsius) in Nelson, and the next day or two it will be snowing. The last couple days have been raining in town, but snowing up in the mountains. Never ones to say no to April powder, Steve and I had plans of doing a tour somewhere up in Ymir Bowl. However, the snow we hoped to ski also thwarted us a bit.

I took the winter tires off of my car about 3 weeks ago, because, well, its supposed to be spring. But that act made it a little challenging to get up to Whitewater today as they hadn't plowed the road and I just couldn't make it up the final hill to the parking lot. So, we reassessed and decided to ski over at Evening Ridge since we'd already passed the parking lot. We found about 6 inches in the parking lot and it only got deeper the higher we got. However, we also new that all of this snow, which was of the high density variety, was sitting on top of a thick crust and could slide easily if we weren't careful. So we opted to play it safe, do some exploring and check out a treed line that we'd never skied. Our ascent and descent line is in red.



Skinning up through beautifully spaced trees, we knew that the run down would be great.



The snow kept getting deeper the higher we got. There was up to 16 inches sitting on top of the crust and 12 of those inches were from the last few days. Can you believe this is April 25th?



We had a blast playing in the trees on the way down. Joshua enjoying the late April pow.



Steve going big.



More pillow fun.



I have a couple of videos from today, but they're having some problems uploading. I'll try and see if I can add them later, otherwise I'll put them in a new post.