Backcountry101

Update – Where has La Niña Gone? What it means for Skiing in BC now.

The start of 2025 has been drier than usual in parts of British Columbia, with some areas experiencing early-season drought conditions. While lower elevations lack fresh snowfall, dedicated skiers and riders can still find quality turns in the backcountry, for a BC ski conditions update: where to find the best snow, the key, as always, is knowing where to look.

Snowfall Has Been Highly Variable

This season has been defined by inconsistent snowfall across BC. While some areas have struggled with minimal accumulation, others have been hit with heavy dumps. A prime example is Crescent Spur Heliskiing, which received an impressive 40-60 cm in 30 hours, while nearby Tête Jaune saw only 2 cm in the same period. These drastic differences highlight the unpredictable nature of this year’s snowfall patterns for anyone looking to update on BC ski conditions.

Despite the lack of major storms, many ski hills have done an excellent job maintaining skiable terrain. Their grooming teams have been hard at work, ensuring their resorts remain in top shape for visitors. While fresh powder may be limited, the well-maintained runs continue to offer enjoyable skiing.

Backcountry Conditions: What to Watch For

For those venturing into the backcountry, there are both opportunities and hazards to keep in mind. Snow coverage varies significantly by region, and the snowpack is far from uniform. In the BC Interior, the snowpack tends to taper sharply as you descend into or below the treeline, making route selection crucial. Some mountain ranges have remained relatively thin, while conditions in other areas are even more sparse, making glacier travel especially challenging. Skiers and riders should do the appropriate research before any trip, approach specific areas cautiously, and be prepared for tricky navigation over exposed terrain.

Another important factor this season is a persistent layer of buried surface hoar, which has been reactive in some areas but not in others. Regions like Rogers Pass have seen increased activity, mainly where wind slabs have formed. Travellers in avalanche terrain should carefully assess slope stability and check regional forecasts before heading out. Thus, BC ski conditions update: always keep track of recent reports before any backcountry adventure.

Navigating the Season Ahead

With such varied conditions, adaptability is key. If planning a backcountry trip, pay close attention to recent weather patterns and local snow reports. Avalanche forecasts remain critical, particularly with a spotty but potentially dangerous weak layer in play. For valuable information, utilize Avalanche Canada’s Public Avalanche Bulletin, our Know Before You Go, and Resources and Organizations for the latest BC ski conditions update.

As we move further into the season, keep an eye on shifting snow conditions and be prepared for a mix of deep snow in some places and firm or shallow coverage in others. Whether inbounds or out in the backcountry, staying informed will help ensure safe and rewarding turns. Here’s to making the most of BC’s unpredictable winter!

Brad Harrison, Colwest Alpine Adventures
Professional Member, Canadian Avalanche Association
Executive Director, Backcountry Lodges of BC Association

Pioneering Life of Mary Schäffer Warren 

Wildflowers, a film about Mary Schäffer Warren’s pioneering life, made its big screen debut last fall at the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival.

In the film, a group of women led by outdoor writer Meghan J. Ward retraces Schäffer’s legendary 1908 expedition to Maligne Lake in Jasper National Park.

Co-produced by Ward, based in Banff, and Trixie Pacis, a filmmaker from Kimberley, the documentary is based on the shared passions for mountain exploration and history held by two women, Schäffer Warren (1861-1939) and Ward, separated by a century.

“Having our world premiere at the Banff festival was our big goal from the beginning, not only because it is a prestigious festival but because it is one with deep connections to the film,” according to Pacis, the film’s director.  

Schäffer Warren was a pioneer in more ways than one. Born in Pennsylvania, she was destined to buck the conventions of polite early 20th-century Victorian society, where a woman’s place was to be dressed up nicely for teatime in the parlour. 

Schäffer Warren was born into money, and it came with privilege. She studied art at a young age and married Dr. Charles Schäffer, a doctor and amateur botanist. Together, they made many train trips to Banff, and she fell in love with the Canadian Rockies. Mt. Schaffer near Lake O’Hara is named after the couple.

When her husband died, she was widowed at age 43. 

That’s when her life took a big turn. Schäffer Warren “reinvented herself as a mountain explorer, writer and photographer,” as described on the Wildflowers’ website.

She was the first non-Indigenous woman to visit Maligne Lake and many parts of Jasper and Banff national parks. She also wrote two books, including the classic Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies.

The seeds for Wildflowers were planted in 2020 when Pacis started working with Ward at Paul Ziska Photography in Banff. They became friends and soon learned they were fascinated with mountain history, notably Mary Schäffer Warren. 

More than a century after the original journey, Ward, photographer Natalie Gillis, and travel writer Jane Marshall decided to follow Schäffer Warren’s inspiring footsteps to Maligne Lake.

Pacis, a Banff Centre Adventure Filmmakers Workshop graduate, saw it as a perfect pitch for a documentary film.

“Like Mary, Meghan moved west to the Rockies and reinvented herself as a mountain writer. Meghan once described her curiosity about Mary as ‘an itch that can’t be scratched,’” Pacis said.

Schäffer Warren remains an inspiring figure for women in many ways. In the early 1900s, when females were not allowed to join official survey parties, a man employed by the Geological Survey of Canada had the guts to ask Schäffer Warren to survey Maligne Lake. 

It says a lot about the respect she had as an explorer and woman who was smart and could handle herself as well as any man could in the mountains.

At the same time, Pacis said Schäffer Warren’s life overlapped with “a significant time of colonial impact in the Canadian Rockies.”

“Reflecting on Mary’s legacy invites us to ask questions, rethink history, and consider what we can do now to blaze a better trail forward,” Pacis said.

Schäffer Warren built a house in Banff and eventually remarried one of her longtime guides, Billy Warren.

She died in 1939 of pneumonia but left behind a legacy of trailblazing – in the mountains and in a society that tried to put restrictive limits on what a woman could choose to do.   

Natalie Gillis, the documentary team’s photographer, died tragically last June in a plane crash.

“Banff was also special to our friend and expedition photographer,” said Pacis. “We have dedicated this film in loving memory of Nat and know that sharing this film in Banff, surrounded by her family and our friends, was a unique way to honour her memory.”

Written by Andrew Findlay – @afindlayjournalist

Good for BC Riders 

The weather gurus predicted we had a 71% chance that we would experience a La Nina weather system this season. This shift can alter weather patterns, creating a northwest flow that funnels cold, moisture-laden air from the Pacific Ocean into BC, perhaps lots of snow for us to enjoy. For a detailed explanation of this winter’s La Nina forecast and how it might affect conditions in BC, visit OpenSnow, written by meteorologist Alan Smith.

As we move through January, it is worth doing a quick summary of the snowpack in the alpine and around the province. A couple of avalanche incidents were reported earlier. Avalanche Canada started their regular forecasts on November 21^st at 4:00 PM PST. Check your local forecast and any MIN (Mountain Information Network) reports that refer to the area around your riding destination.

It’s always a good time to inspect your gear; double-check that your transceiver is functioning properly. Industry professionals continually work on their companion rescue skills. Do some drills with your touring partners. Is your tape, glue, spare batteries, etc., and other gear in your pack all functioning as expected? When was the last time you re-glued your skin? Waxed your board or skis?

We are fortunate in Canada to have many resources, such as detailed weather forecasts, at our fingertips. Some of my go-to’s are Windy.com and YR.NO, but DriveBC highway forecasts can also provide important information. You may consider taking an avalanche course or a refresher with a local provider.

Be well prepared if you plan to head out into the backcountry. Understand what the avalanche danger ratings mean, particularly High – “natural avalanches are likely, human-triggered avalanches are very likely,” Considerable – “natural avalanches are possible, human-triggered avalanches are likely” and Moderate – “natural avalanches unlikely, human-triggered avalanches possible.”

In the spirit of safety, let’s stay informed, communicate effectively, and adapt our plans accordingly. Winter’s challenges are part of the adventure, and with a thoughtful approach, we can continue to enjoy our alpine environment while managing risks. Here’s to making smart decisions, respecting the backcountry and its residents, and ensuring an enjoyable, memorable and safe winter season. Please remember to #recreateresponsibly and ask others to do the same.

Take good care.

Brad Harrison
Executive Director, BLBCA
[email protected]

The story of one of the most important inventions in ski touring history  

I attached Alpine Trekkers to my downhill skis the first time I went ski touring and clicked in with my clunky Alpine boots. It was 1997, and I was probably lifting more than 10 pounds of gear with each stride. I was also young, fit and ignorant enough to think the system was amazing. Until one day a Swiss mountain guide using Dynafit touring bindings left me dragging a mile behind him.

I can still picture those bindings. They don’t look that different than the ones on my skis today or the first pin binding introduced in 1984, as such “Low-Tech” bindings are unique among outdoor gear.

Besides the two wheels, today’s mountain bikes share little with the early off-road rigs of 40 years ago. Backpacks have gone from exterior aluminum frames to internal suspension systems. And while skis still have a tip and tail, everything in between has changed.

Meanwhile, the pincer toe, U-pin and boxy heels of today’s tech bindings are obviously descendants of the binding Fritz Barthel invented four decades ago.

“Laziness is the mother of invention,” says Barthel.

The story goes, in 1982, he and a buddy were driving back to Austria from a Mediterranean climbing trip and, on a whim, decided to ski Mont Blanc. When they reached the summit, they were exhausted and nearly didn’t make it back to the car. On the drive home, Barthel, an engineering student and lifelong tinkerer, wondered what he could have done differently. Low Tech’s 30th Anniversary

“I could have trained more to be in a better shape,” he told GearJunkie, a website. “But this was not really an option for me, as I’m a very lazy person.” It All Started With a Near-Death Experience: The Toe-Pin Ski Binding Turns 40

The logical solution was to design a lighter touring binding system. Touring bindings at the time worked similarly to today’s “frame” bindings with resort-style bindings mounted on a plate, or frame, that swivelled from a point near the toe. Barthel realized the key to a lighter setup was the relatively new introduction of stiff plastic ski boots. It would eliminate the need for a heavy frame. The problem was the connection.

After many iterations, Barthel developed a system that used metal pins at the toe that coordinated with notches on a boot and a similar connection at the heel that spun out of the way for climbing.

“At the time, everything had to be called ‘high-tech’ to be successful,” Barthel says. “But, what should this lightweight, mechanically simple binding be called? Low Tech, of course.”

By 1984, Barthel had a working prototype and a patent for his Low-Tech system. He shopped the idea to all the big boot and binding manufacturers, but they were put off by the unusual-looking binding and the fact shoppers of the new bindings also required new boots.

“I still have all the rejection [letters] of all the companies,” Barthel said. “There was no official interest.”

Eventually, Dynafit permitted him to retrofit the binding connections into its boots, with the catch that Barthel had to buy them first. Dynafit.com

His dad, an avid backcountry skier, raised some money, and Barthel turned his basement into a workshop. At first, sales were slow. Then, some ski-mo racers saw the advantage, adopted the system and started winning races. Soon, Barthel was manually retrofitting 1,000 pairs of boots a year. It was unsustainable for a home-based business, and Low Tech was finally enticing enough for the more prominent companies.

In 1990, Dynafit licensed the patent, took over the boot and binding manufacturing and renamed the Tourlite Tech system. (Thirty-five years later, Barthel continues to consult with Dynafit about their bindings and boots.)

As the system gained popularity among the growing ski touring community, Dynafit became synonymous with “tech” bindings. Barthel’s original patent expired in 2006. Overnight, several ski brands introduced their versions.

One of the first was Vancouver-based G3 or Genuine Guide Gear. In the mid-2000s, an alpine touring binding fit well with its mix of avalanche safety gear and telemark bindings. Its first offering, the Onyx binding, sought to alleviate concerns that the tiny pins weren’t reliable or robust enough for hard downhill skiing. It looked beefier and had lateral release values, similar to the DIN settings on resort bindings. It has since been replaced by more minimalist models that the new owner of G3 will continue to sell. G3 is back online and ready for another lap; see G3 Bindings.

The Onyx was a precursor to the Marker Kingpin, which had a pin-style toe but an alpine binding-style heel. Salomon and its sister brand Atomic eventually adapted the idea further with the Shift binding. It uses a pin-style toenail for skinning and a traditional alpine attachment system for the descent, Marker Kingpin Bindings, 2025.

Low tech is now catching on in snowboarding. First, individual riders milled pin connections into their soft boots or created their own “franked systems” out of alpine touring gear. Today, there are several brands, such as Phantom Snow. Voile and Spark R&D, who design and manufacture tech-style boots and bindings specifically for split-boarding, see Cripple Creek Backcountry.

The dozens of tech-style bindings on the market mostly stick closer to Barthel’s original goal of making ski touring lighter and more user-friendly. The latest company to get into the pin binding game is Tyrolia with its new Almonte 12 PT. They look and function very similar to the originals but are lighter, safer, more reliable and easier to use. As such, Fritz Barthel is one of the key architects who made ski touring the approachable and accessible sport it is today. I thank him every time I skin past someone sweating uphill in a clunky frame binding or, worse, Alpine Trekkers.

Written by Ryan Stuart – @Ryan_Adventures

The United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. Let’s face it: it’s a hopeful declaration. Between about 100,000 and 11,000 years ago, most of North America was frozen beneath ice three kilometres thick in places. Known as the Wisconsin glaciation, it was the last major ice age to grip the northern hemisphere. Time must have practically stood still in this virtually lifeless landscape. It’s no wonder that humans would adopt the word “glacial” as a metaphor for things that move ponderously slowly.

However, that metaphor is melting. The glaciers we know are vestiges of ancient geological history, and they are rapidly leaving the ice age. Human-caused climate change is accelerating this exit. Unless we can limit global warming to a few more tenths of a degree, we’ll lose two-thirds of the world’s remaining glaciers by the year 2100.

Helm Glacier is one of them. Nestled on the north face of Gentian Peak, near Garibaldi Lake, the Helm has been studied more than almost any other glacier in southwestern BC. Federal government scientists started taking measurements there in the 1960s when it covered an area of around 4 square kilometres. Today, it covers just a square kilometre, and it’s not long for this world, says Mark Ednie, a geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada.

The Helm is one of dozens that Ednie monitors in the Western Cordillera of Canada, from the Rockies to the Coast Range. He visits all of them twice a year: once in the spring to measure snow depth and snow density and once in late summer to measure ice melt. Combine these two measurements, and you get something called “mass balance,” a metric that describes whether a glacier is growing or shrinking.

“It’s usually in the negative column,” Ednie says.

You don’t need to be a geologist to know that most of our glaciers are disappearing; you only need to spend a few summers in the mountains and open your eyes.      

Scientists divided a glacier into two zones. The accumulation zone occupies the higher elevations, where the ice remains snow-covered year-round. Below that snow, or firn line, is the zone of ablation, where more snow is lost than accumulates and is often bare ice.

A healthy glacier is growing and is in constant motion. Snow in the accumulation zone feeds the formation of ice, which flows from the upper to lower reaches of the glacier.

Since Ednie started visiting Helm Glacier in 2018, there has been no accumulation zone. Whatever snow falls in winter is long gone by the end of summer.

“So, it means the whole glacier is melting,” Ednie says.

It’s a similar story for most of the glaciers he monitors. And worse for ones like the Peyto Glacier, a dying appendage of the Wapta Icefield in the Rockies with data going back to the late 1800s. The effects of anthropogenic global warming are compounded by ash from massive forest fires. Ash darkens the glacier and reduces the albedo effect, or the surface’s ability to reflect the sun’s energy. The result is an even faster rate of ice melt.

In some ways, Ednie’s work is similar to that of the palliative care business. He makes the rounds to ailing glaciers and takes measurements, the way a nurse dutifully takes the vitals of a terminally ill patient. They know the end is near, but they do it just the same.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide depend on rivers originating in high mountains. In western Canada, melting snowpack contributes most of the flow to rivers with mountain headwaters. Glacier melt, on the other hand, is responsible for a small portion of streamflow, less than five percent on the Bow River, for example. However, it’s a significant contribution. Melting ice gives streams and rivers a pulse of water during the year’s hottest months. There’s a reason glaciers have been called the water coolers of the earth; they store moisture for when we need it the most. When these water coolers vanish, it will have cascading impacts on irrigation, drinking water, fish habitat, and how we manage water.

Despite the dim outlook for glaciers, even anemic ones like the Helm in the Coast Mountains or the rapidly melting Peyto are still beautiful. Earth’s history is written in the layered, turquoise-coloured walls of a crevasse like the rings of a tree. Glaciers appear, for the most part, still and silent. Yet they are animate, moving imperceptibly by the pull of gravity as they scour, claw, grind and shape the underlying rock over thousands of years into the rugged landscapes we cherish.

Next to scientists like Ednie, who poke and prod glaciers for research purposes, mountain guides, perhaps more than any other people, have a profoundly intimate relationship with glaciers. As a Squamish-based guide, Evan Stevens has lived and worked in Sea to Sky Country since 1998. Stevens has witnessed phenomenal changes in the Coast Mountains, but in a brief period, it doesn’t even register in geological terms. Moats and bergschrunds are bigger and more complicated to navigate. Glaciers like the Serratus in the Tantalus Range are so shattered and broken by late summer that they are almost too dangerous to travel. Where ice retreats, unstable ground is uncovered, creating new rockfall hazards. In other cases, melting alpine permafrost is causing mass wasting events, like the cataclysmic landslide that ripped from the north face of Mt. Joffre near Pemberton in 2019.  According to Stevens, most people think about the toe or terminus of a glacier when it comes to glacial recession. It’s easy to benchmark a glacier’s retreat. However, the diminishing thickness, perhaps less noticeable to the naked eye from year to year, profoundly impacts mountain travel, particularly at that threshold between rock and ice. As the ice thins, the glacier pulls away from cols and mountain passes. What once was a straightforward descent on skis or boots can become a technical descent requiring rappels to reach the glacier.

“As guides, we’re always thinking about plans A, B, C and D and making decisions on the fly. But in some cases, the decision is simple – not to go. The seasons are getting shorter, and some areas have higher hazards. It’s grim,” Stevens says. “I guess it’s not changing what I do, but it’s changing where and when I do it.”

Speaking to people like Stevens and Mark Ednie, you get the sense that travelling across glaciers these days is as much physical as it is nostalgic. It strikes at something existential to mountain people: the disconcerting notion of an alpine without glaciers.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s alarming, but it’s also scientifically fascinating to imagine what we would have seen hundreds of years ago and what we will see in the future,” says Ednie. “I have two young daughters, and I want to make sure they see some of these places before they’re gone.”

Written by Andrew Findlay – @afindlayjournalist