Winter Wanderings, Greater Vancouver

Spring (maybe even summer) has finally arrived in Vancouver with ultimate/hiking/BBQ-on-the-beach season in full swing.   Before it’s too late I wanted to post a few pictures from some of my winter snow-shoe trips in the Greater Vancouver area.  I took a few, but most of the photo credits go to Rod and to fellow avy-course participant Jodi. 

Here are a few from a beautiful day up at Cypress snow-shoeing Mount Hollyburn.   There were lots of people on the trail, but I loved seeing the dogs heading downhill and slip-sliding out of control yet lovin’ every second of it.

Vancouver hiding beneath the clouds:

Clear view of the lions (the two medium sized bumps).  I hope to hike them one of these days when the snow melts.

A whiskey-jack (officially the gray jay).  At Whistler these birds are fun to watch since some of them have learned to perch on ski poles.

And some shots from a short-but-sweet snowshoe up Mount Seymour to catch the sunset.  

And finally some from an avalanche course Rod and I did, also at Seymour.  I felt a lot better about recognizing potentially dangerous terrain after taking the course, and it was good to get a lot of practice working with transponders.  It was actually pretty fun looking for buried backpacks in the snow with transponders in them...hopefully I’ll never have to be in the situation that the transponder is attached to a person instead.

Heading into avalanche terrain...

These dogs were awesome.  I wished I had a pair to help pull me up the mountain too!

Our fearless leader wielding a mini-saw to create a snow-pit.   This part got a little complex...not sure if I could repeat it by myself if I had to.  Pretty neat looking at all the layers though and seeing how weak some really are.  Bang it a few times with a shovel and you can make an entire slab collapse.  Yikes!

Snow pits mean lots of shovel action.

After establishing that one snow column we dug out was pretty stable with a Rutschblock test , we decided to make it fail! (I’m second from the left)

Our last exercise was a multiple-burial scenario.  We had a team of 4 with one leader, two people looking for buried transponders and myself to poke around to look for “jeans-guy”.   You know jeans-guy, he’s the one who shows up at whatever event unprepared, makes poor decisions, and then gets himself buried in an avalanche with no transponder!

Using a probe in search of jeans-guy at his last known location.

I was unsuccessful, but the others found the buried backpacks with the real transponders and we then formed a probe line in a pretty smooth operation and eventually uncovered the pack.