Sunday, January 23, 2011

a crazy week in the snow

Last week the unavoidable finally happened. The November Facet layer got overloaded by one of the bigger snowstorms in recent years. Over a meter of storm snow combined with high winds and warm temperatures did the trick. A huge natural cycle occured sometimes in the afternoon of the 17th and the morning of the 18th. Since we had clear skies on the 18th with a very limited ski program, we decided to get the groups in at 3 p.m. and go for a major bombing run to open up more skiing for the future. 40 shots produced many large avalanches, all of them ran either on the Facet layer or on glacier ice. Do give you an idea about the work we do and the magnitude of those avalanches, check out this video. Marty Schaeffer, a promising young assistant guide, combined his and my footage together in a short clip. Enjoy!I guess I did forget to mention that the skiing was great throughout the past couple of weeks. Here are some samples from Friday, for a change those images show me skiing in the Crystalline, and are taken from Marty Schaefer and Peter Lemiuox on the very bottom. As far as I remember these are some of the few images I have of myself, usually I'm the one behind the lens. It's been a really busy time lately either lead guiding or snow safety, so I haven't got my brain set to shooting mode yet.

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