Spontaneous inspirations of Stephen Connick

We went for a quick tour in Kananaskis last weekend, I drove down to Calgary after the Oilers game on Friday night and made it to Brendan’s place around 3AM. We woke up and met the rest of the group in Canmore where we had a quick stop for coffee and bagels.

I was the only splitboarder in the party and the rest of the group was made up of skiers and one other snowboarder using a small pair of approach skis for the climbing portion. I think I had him sold on the concept of a splitboard by the end of the day.

We headed south on Spray trail and pulled off at the access to Hero Knob, I’m not exactly sure what to call the area we toured into other than it is in between Hero Knob and Black Prince.

The trail breaking was fairly light as the trail that leads into this area is fairly level and the elevation gain is gradual. It was snowing rather heavily (3-4CM/HR) so there was more snow to deal with as the day progressed, YAY! The new snow that was falling was very light and unconsolidated sitting on top of a fairly solid  slab, we still took precautions on the climb and chose our terrain carefully as there was the unlikely potential of stepping down to the burried facets and depth hoar. My primary thought of the day was the slopes above and around us loading with all the fresh snow that was falling and although we didn’t witness any recent slide activity there was some increased sluffing and overloading happening on some features in the area.

The turns were way better than expected, I almost didn’t go on this trip how terrible would that have felt to have missed out on a great day of extremely light rocky mountain powder.