Photo Comp Winner
Congratulations to Wayne Hingley from Calgary for submitting the winning shot.
Wayne sent in the first image in this sequence as his competition entry and the judges were unanimous that this should be the winning image. When we told Wayne of the win, he sent back a story around the winning image, together with a couple more images from his earlier trip in December….
Location is Sale Mountain in early January. Fred Lachance and I were there to do some sledding and drop a few lines on snowboard & skis. We had been there about 3 weeks prior and observed a heavy cover of hoar frost on all slopes at all elevations at that time, so we were particularly concerned with snow stability on this trip as there was a lot of new snow since our last visit. So we dug a pit to check things out. We observed the heavy hoar layer at about 50cm and it failed on Moderate 2. We chose to take the careful option and rooped the hell out of all the deeeeeep fresh powder on low-angle terrain with our sleds. At the end of the day Fred dropped a few short treed lines on his snowboard which produced some small releases of the storm snow on the nasty hoar layer.
It’s refreshing to hear of people taking their avalanche knowledge seriously and more importantly acting on the knowledge that they find when digging a pit and doing stability tests. Transpires that Wayne has already been on a course with the competition sponsor Hangfire Training but still felt it was worth entering the comp. He says the prize is now going to be used to make sure someone he knows is as well trained and educated as they can be….
Thanks to all the people who submitted images to the competition in December and January.
HUGE thanks also goes out to our sponsors Hangfire Avalanche Training who kindly donated an AST1 course as the prize for this competition.
