In the winter of 2015 and 2016, western coast of North America was influenced by an interesting weather phenomenon called El Niño. Without going into detailed scientific description of this occurrence, it is enough said that the climate becomes a bit warmer and more humid. For Revelstoke this means incredibly intense and frequent snowfalls.The weather in the town itself may be more rainy than snowy, but this changes with elevation creating incredible conditions for skiing.

As everywhere, sudden episodes of warm weather happen even above 2000 m, but this does not affect the snow that much, as the snowpack is incredibly thick. The negative aspect of El Niño is that the avalanche conditions get more complex – big snowfalls and warmth mean drastic rise in avalanche danger. El Niño also made my photographer’s work a bit complicated – we got only about 10 sunny days in the season! Most of the time sky was overcast so scoring a good shooting day was really hard.