Another lovely day in the mountains. The turning slopes were a bit of a challenge, swallowing us almost whole a few times.
This trip had been done by Doug a few days earlier. Peter enjoyed it enough to come out for a second go in less than a week. We had some disturbing news about rain at the base of Louise but decided to see for ourselves. The ski out had been groomed and was quite nice, although at temps near zero it would have been a challenge on wax alone (we all used skins or kicker skins).


Climbing the ski out to Temple Lodge

The route up Purple bowl had been used by the avalanche patrol since Saturday. This actually made for a fairly nice, easy track all the way up to just below the tree line. We had a lunch at tree line and then headed up to Wolverine Ridge where there seemed to be lots of untouched snow.


Peter and Bill on Wolverine Ridge (Lake Louise area in background)

Terry, Bill and Carl on Wolverine Ridge (Unity Peak in the background)

Unfortunately there was some nice fresh snow on top of a fairly supportive crust, on top of a bunch of unconsolidated snow. So, we'd make a few nice turns and then suddenly break through. It was tiring to extract oneself from the sitzmark that resulted.


Our "not quite so sweet" turns off Wolverine Ridge

For our second (and last) run we skied up to the northeast side of the bowl below Unity Peak. This made for a nice tour of the whole bowl and the more gradual slope was a little easier to handle although the conditions were about the same.


Climbing up the end of Purple Bowl (Mt Redoubt in the background)

Some of us were eager to be home before too late and so we headed down a little before 3:00. Even the slope leading up into the bowl provided us with significant challenges.
Many thanks to Bill, Jim, Peter and Terry for joining me, Carl (C/S).