New snow monitoring in Squamish provides S2S locals with more accurate (and safer) backcountry data.
words & photography :: Chris Christie
On any given morning, my backcountry decision-making process starts at home. With caffeine in hand, I scroll through favoured links—weather, snow quality, avalanche advisories—to decipher the nuances in the data available and build the best adventure plan. But for the mountains closest to home (Squamish), the information available has never been that local, until recently.
Avalanche forecasting for an entire province is tricky. Based out of Revelstoke, professional forecasters at Avalanche Canada (AvCan) receive localized daily submissions of technical snow, weather, avalanche and terrain information from other professionals throughout the province (guides, ski patrols, other avalanche technicians, etc.). The province is divided into regional boundaries daily by AvCan forecasters and then further broken down into subregions to reflect variable conditions within each area. Hazard advisories are posted daily during the winter season. It’s a complicated system and, living in the Sea to Sky, particularly Squamish, we sit on the border of three large regions that often have different danger ratings, despite their proximity.
For most of my ski career, I didn’t think much of the forecasting for Squamish as I rarely skied here, instead driving north to Whistler, Pemberton and beyond. Increased highway congestion has been eating at my desire to leave home, however, and the arrival of the Sea to Sky Gondola opened new terrain and a local mountain culture. When conditions align, skiing above the Salish Sea is a true highlight of living in the Coast Range.
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Not far from the gondola’s Summit Lodge, the skin track rises steeply out of the valley, giving the advanced skier an incredible variety of unpatrolled options that require careful assessment and decision-making. While “The Mini Dolomites” (my own nickname for the Sky Pilot Range) have a high concentration of excellent ski mountaineering options, the approach and skiable areas are complex terrain with many uncontrolled avalanche paths. I’ve always wondered if we are receiving consistent data representing our surrounding mountains. And with Squamish essentially falling on a regional borderline, how do we manage the information given to us?
Generally, we have a coastal snowpack in the Sea to Sky, meaning moist, cohesive snow. Counting on that fact alone is a poor risk-management choice, as we don’t have to move far to find variability in conditions. Each valley has its own unique weather pattern, influenced by ice caps, elevation, aspect, wind, accumulation and of course climate change. All of these factors impact stability. With a newfound concentration of skiers coming to Squamish, there was a need for consistent, professional and focused gathering of data relevant to this area.
To add a new level of clarity, Zenith Mountain Guides Evan Stevens and Eric Carter have been collaborating with the Sea to Sky Gondola since last winter to fill that information void, providing local observations and data to the Canadian Avalanche Association’s professional information exchange, known as InfoEx. Zenith Mountain Guides are out weekly (at least), collecting information with boots on the ground and hands in the same snow we are skiing here in Squamish, while also discussing their findings with local colleagues. All that information is added to data collected by AvCan forecasters in Revelstoke to create more accurate forecasts for our region.
Zenith Guides’ unbiased field notes update mountain users of current conditions for skiing, including forecast weather models. On top of that, the Sea to Sky Gondola has funded a weather station at the Exit Gulley (1,580 metres), providing hourly weather updates. Combined, these new tools are useful for developing a sense of local conditions and mitigating risk in the Squamish backcountry. Our local avy forecasts still come from 500 kilometres away in Revelstoke, but the information they’re based on is more local than ever before.
One important note: When avalanche conditions are at a high hazard level, the Sea to Sky Gondola will not upload skis or snowboards. This policy is in part for the safety of guests, but also in respect of local SAR resources who would be dispatched in the event of an incident (or multiple incidents).
New and more localized information is an excellent resource, but experience, caution and good decision-making is still ultimately up to each individual. Adding these resources to your morning routine is an excellent foundation in the trip-planning process.
Subscribe to the weekly Zenith reports at snow.zenithguides.ca and get the Avalanche Canada forecasts at avalanche.ca/map.
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