We spent Saturday night at Murphy Lake outside Eureka, MT on a forest service road before heading on to Fernie, BC Sunday morning.
They have had a great winter up here, but it ended a couple of weeks ago. The last week has been really warm and warm makes icy. We did manage to find some good turns Sunday but we mostly just took it easy. North facing slopes had not melted out too much and were decent. They also opened a hike above the area that provided some really great turns.
Fernie is super awesome and let’s you stay overnight for free in the parking lot. It was nice to not drive anywhere so we could just relax right after riding.
The forecast Sunday night called for a couple cm. of new snow so we were not expecting much. We woke up (late, of course) to about 10 cm. 10 cm. is not enough to cover all of the icy spots, but it sure helped. The steeps that had not iced up as much held the snow well and it blew in plenty of places to make it even deeper. We found a lot of really good turns in Timber Bowl (Big Bang and Black Cloud) and Currie Bowl (Currie Glades and the north-facing steeps off the ridge). The lower pitches that were not groomed were also a ton of fun. It was fairly heavy snow and it warmed up more during the day so it was tiring riding as you really had to power through even the soft snow.
Sara making steep turns on Big Bang.
Now we are camped again in the parking lot. We got Sara an avalanche transceiver in Bozeman so we practiced finding beacons in the parking lot. Sara has now taken the dogs for a ski and Kenai is trying his new booties. The experiment does not seem very successful as he threw two of the booties before they even started out.
It is currently lightly raining/sleeting/snowing here at the base so hopefully they are getting snow up at the top. There is not supposed to be any meaningful accumulation until Thursday night so we will probably just mess around the next few days and make sure we are here Friday. With any luck the 18 cm. forecast (which may have just dropped to 10 cm. anyway) will be more. Regardless, we have no set plans other than gradually heading north so if the snow doesn’t cooperate we will just head for AK.