Despite the relatively normal sounding avalanche bulletin everyone was quite wary of the avalanche conditions. "Spooky" is a word that avalanche professionals seem to be using a lot this year. Looks like some skiers just avoided getting caught in this little nasty:
Anyway we did a couple of laps on one of the gentler moraines and then ventured onto the steeper treed slopes on far skiers right.
The skiing was, in a word, awesome.
Steve, Nick, and Fred headed home after skiing on Saturday. Brenda and I stayed and we had a short day in NRC Gully on Sunday.
If NRC wasn't just a giant avalanche path we would ski here more often! The turns-to-effort ratio is brilliant; you simply step out of the car, go up, rip off your skins, and ski right back down to the car.
But the fact remains that NRC is simply a giant avalanche path and I find it a little spooky.
Earlier this year a truly big avalanche ripped through NRC that ran beyond it's normal runout and tore up mature timber. We found lots of evidence of this event. Most of the trees have fresh scars on their uphill sides like this one:
The skiing was so-so. NRC is west facing, compared to Bonney which faces north, and the warm sun earlier in the week had made a crust that lurked about 30cm below the surface. We managed to avoid any classic telemark-death-crust-face-plants, but, like the crust itself, the possibility was always there, lurking!
On our drive home, we had, I think, our first-ever sighting of a golden eagle as it flew overhead. It was a huge bird, with some white markings underneath its wings. Very exciting, as I've been wanting to see one for a while!
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