November 11, 2002, Black Tusk Area, Garibaldi Pk

Craig and I headed up the Black Tusk Road to catch some November turns. The road has sprouted some fairly large waterbars recently demanding a 4wd truck to cross them. My trusty Sidekick went through with no problem but we hit snow around 3000 feet. Even with chains, I started to slip around a bit, so opted to park the truck around 4000 feet, rather than roll it into a ditch, and skin the remaining distance to the gate. The snow started at around 6 inches deep and then built to around a foot (obviously, another storm had laid down some base above 5000 feet) but there were still a lot of rocks around. Once in the alpine, we used the road to contour around the towers and crossed into the large bowl located just north-west of the Tusk itself and worked our way up to a ridge around 6000 feet. In some spots, the snow had drifted with the wind to around 3 feet deep. Surface conditions had heavy wind effect and the freezing level must have come up to around 5000 feet because the snow was extremely moist and graupel like.

The visibility in the alpine was very poor, light flurries came down on and off, and the light was flat making it rather tricky to ski but we put in a few hundred feet of alpine turns and quite a few face plants. As we got lower down, the definition improved but the ski quality was still so-so. The best skiing was actually down the road in the moist, but non-wind affected snow. We saw a few snowboarders in the alpine building a hit and a couple more near the gate rail riding a big green drainpipe they had brought up with them (!) I just realised that they must have dragged this with them around 1/2 a kilometer. Talk about dedicated! We even saw another one coming up the road in the back of another truck as we headed down. At any rate, we managed to ski to within 30 minutes of the car with minimal base damage.

On another note, I just heard from the G3 folks (today, the 14th) that the road is now snowed in down to around 3600 feet but there's now a solid 4 feet in the alpine! It looks like this area may be out for the season after another storm but lots of other areas will open up by the end of this weekend if that's the case. Sorry about the mixed measurement units. Canadians are weird that way.

Jonathan.

;)