End of April, through May and into June

June 5 - West side of Oscar Peak with a fork of the large glacier at the headwaters of Poupard Creek.

June 5 - Skinning up the mellow and smooth lower glacier with Poupard in the clouds beyond.

June 5 - The broken upper glacier with the summit of Poupard beyond.

June 5 - Brad skinning up onto the lower glacier. Fantastic hanging glaciers beyond.

June 5 - Breaking out of the trees with the views of our destination coming in.

May 21 - Roy and his first encounter with a porcupine. I just pulled out them out by hand. Roy was a real champ and didn't even complain. He didn't learn his lesson though and the following weekend at the same spot he got a few more in his face. Photo courtesy of Dave Weddell.

May 8th - Elissa going for first tracks in the Dogleg Couloir below Cornice Mountain. Fantastic corn snow.

April 30 - Oscar Peak from Lava Lake. We spent a large chunk of our season on this mountain exploring all over looking for and skiing many new runs. Great days of exploration. On April 30th we skied from the top of the little triangle just lookers right of the true summit. 6000ft of fun skiing.

April 30

April 30

April 30 - Dave Duddy who was a member of another group on the mountain this day skiing a fun looking face near the summit of Oscar Peak. Up here is it pretty rare to share a mountain with a different group away from the Shames area.

April 30 - Nearing the top of our run. We would ski off the top of pointy thing to the right of the true summit.

11 days out in the mountains on my skis with a few days here and there getting up to some notable things. On April 30 two seperate parties made it up onto the Oscar Glacier skiing some fun lines. One group from Terrace skied the skiers right line from up high while our crew of Ruparians and Terrights skied the far skiers left face which we skied way way back in Spring Break. We found powder from the very top of our steep face, into the big couloir and even a few pockets through the morraine at the bottom. Pretty amazing considering the heat at the time. The snow quickly turned to slop through the waterfall and made for an interesting don't you dare stop to talk for fear of getting taken out by a giant ball of snow. It was a fantastic day out under a blue sky. Nothing like skiing a 6000ft run (of which a large chunk was powder) on the very last day of April.

Another fun day had 3 of us heading out from Shames to ski the dogleg couloir below cornice ridge. We approached it from the top of the t-bar, heading up and over East Ridge to the col at the head of Mystic Valley. A bear had been all through the area trying to find a way into the Zymachord Valley which made for some entertaining sites. A quick boot up the ridge to near the summit of Cornice Ridge and we skied fantastic corn through the couloir and out onto the apron below. It was a great day out and we had more than enough snow to ski right back to the base area via Mystic Valley without any problems.

Fast forward to June 5 where Brad and I went up into the Nass area to see what we could find on Mount Poupard. Brad pushed his truck 8km up the May Creek FSR through some heinous brush that would have made walking difficult to the end of the logging cut which put us directly below one of the main valleys coming off Poupard. We hiked for an hour over broken snow through steep forest and within 90 minutes of the truck were easily skinning up a broad snow filled valley. We took the gradual approach option of skiing right up onto the mellow glacier and seeing that the upper glacier was considerably broken up with loads of sagging bridges decided against exploring higher in that direction. So instead Brad put in a long bootpack up onto a ridge overlooking the large forked valley glacier in the headwaters of Poupard Creek. The ski down this steep face was great on very nice corn and we managed a 3000ft descent on skis until we ran out of snow. A fantastic day that had us out on our feet for just about 8 hours.