Thursday 28 February 2013

Chief Pascal


Daily Vert: 1400m
Total Vert so far: 39,250m

The mellow and accessible slopes of Chief Pascal make an excellent Duffy destination when the avi danger is high, so that is where we went today.  We parked at the Cayoosh parking lot, and after skinning along the south side road and up through the clear cut, we were near the summit and ready to ski after two and a half hours.  For our first run we hit the straight line chute just below the sub peak.  I'd looked at it from above on a previous trip and deemed it pretty gnarly, but on a second look it didn't look to bad... not very long at any rate, and the snow way excellent so we decided to go for it.  The chute isn't a steep as it looks, and with the excellent duffy pow we were able to dump speed quickly on the mellow run out. Definitely a fun way to start the day.

Runar and his DPS Wailers look down the straight line...

Steve at the bottom, stoked that we all nailed it.


After skiing a little further down the bowl we skinned back around the ridge and it was a quick trip up for a second lap.  The snow seemed stable, there hadn't been any signs of instability such as cracking, whoomphing or tree bombs, so we considered heading over to the steeper slopes on skiers right below the big cliffs for our final run.  A very short roll over of a slightly steeper pitch gave us an opportunity to test the stability a little more before committing to the longer slopes, but after this result we re-assesed our plans!

After that wake up call we kept it super mellow for our final lap and then skied back out to the car. The only drawback of this route is the 30 minute skin along the flat to get back to the car, but its a small price to pay for the fun and happy pow on Cheif Pascal!



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