‘A winter of extremes’: Mountain safety specialists say snowpack above average

There's lots of snow in the mountain parks. A team of rescue specialists monitors daily for avalanche conditions.

It’s the most amount of snow in Kananaskis Country south of Canmore that Mountain Safety Specialists in the region have seen in more than two years.

Mike Koppang and his team are out daily looking at snow conditions to see how the snowpack has been building over the winter.

“We have had a bit of a winter of extremes, if you think about it,” he said. “It was extremely warm at the start of the year, we had a lot of rain and then we had an extremely large amount of snowfall – which was great.”

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Koppang is seeing close to 170 centimetres in the Kananaskis region and says he’s watching two layers to see how they’re effecting the stability of the snowpack.

One happened in November. Another, at the beginning of January, created a weak layer after winter dew settled on top of the snow. Now there’s more than 40 centimetres of snow sitting on top of it.

“We’ve had 250 mm of water equivalent that’s fallen on top of that crust,” he said. “And it came in fairly reasonable temperatures, it did come with a fair bit of wind, so when you got a bunch of new snow, a bunch of wind and some warm temperatures, it does promote cornice development.”

Koppang says with cooler temperatures and no new snow, the area is seeing fewer backcountry skiers, but more people ice climbing, hiking or snowshoeing in the park.

“The ski quality has gone down… killer views, great travel, you can go a lot of different places right now walking around the region,” he said. “But in terms of going out there and having those beautiful turns that you would hope to get, there are few and far between right now, but there’s a lot of winter left.”

Still ‘potential’ to trigger an avalanche

But even with a stable snowpack, Koppang says that doesn’t mean there is no risk of triggering an avalanche.

He says people have to have the right tools with them at all times in the backcountry. He says everyone in the group needs an avalanche beacon, shovel and probe - and also needs to know how to use them.

He points to the recent avalanche that a skier was caught in near Lake Louise.

“There’s the potential for somebody to trigger an avalanche wherever we’re going out there,” he said. “I think the big takeaway from that was, it was a thin snowpack, areas are where it’s weak, we’re talking about that a fair bit in the avalanche bulletin right now, I think the big thing for that is really, really fortunate that nobody got hurt.”

Koppang says before people head out into the backcountry, it’s important they read the bulletins posted at Avalanche.ca for the area they’re planning to visit to see the conditions and help them make an educated, smart decision to recreate safely.

“The big difference this year is, because of the large amounts of snow and mild temperatures, we see the snowpack just kind of settle amongst the weight of itself,” he said. “And it squishes down and it forms a bond fairly well, A lot of the other years we don’t have much snow, we have very cold temperatures, and as such, the snowpack sort of just evaporates a little bit and gets that very sugary, weak crystals that form on the base of the snowpack (making it unstable).”