Happy New Year!

About -17C with a light breeze and light snow fall at 9 am.

Crux - steepest climb/descent all within 20m - so much fun we did it twice!

Snowy conditions heading into the valley

In sheltered areas the snow conditions were better than I expected.
And bonus, we were the only adventurers on this trail until later in the day.
Alas, "almost perfect" could not last and about halfway to the knoll a co-adventurer experienced a critical toe binding failure.
After some attempts at denial and mind over matter, we resorted to primitive ski strap technology to keep the boot in place.

We split the group in half and four people headed back to the car, with a short line skied for good measure. The Stanley Creek option proved to be a nice alternative to descending the up track. We were back at the car around 1 pm.

Email excerpt from the other half:
"The four of us are out and on the road. We got back to the cars about 330. We didn’t go all the way to the knoll as it was starting to look more wind affected the more we got up valley and out of the trees. We climbed on the last slope with some trees and did a run there. It was a bit wind affected at the top but with some fresh on top and the bottom half was much better.
We had some lunch and a warm drink and then climbed and traversed to another slope down valley. The snow was quite good here and softer as you went down.
We headed back after this and saw your note on the car - thanks!"

Everything worked out fine with this specific equipment failure. You never know what can happen and it is prudent to carry some items to execute a temporary "MacGyver ".

Thanks for coming out. (thanks to Gerald for photos)

Participants: Norman,Christine,Kim,Gerald,Phyllis,Barbara,Gordon,Jenny.