Sky, snow and light

Forecast

At the waypoint, 1,285 m

Forecast as of 2026-09-29 23:06 UTC. With a connection this strip refreshes itself.

On the ridge, 1,991 m

Forecast as of 2026-09-29 23:06 UTC. With a connection this strip refreshes itself.

Highs and lows in °C, wind in km/h. The forecast model works on a coarse grid and scales its temperatures to 1298 m for the waypoint and 1957 m for the ridge point. Ridge top wind will run stronger than shown.

For a second opinion before you leave town:

• Environment Canada, Grande Cache: the official forecast and any warnings, for the valley.
• SpotWx: Canadian high resolution model runs for the ridge point.
• Windy: wind at ridge height, animated.
• Avalanche Canada, North Rockies: once the snow is down. Forecasts run in winter only.
• Alberta fire bans and 511 Alberta for Highway 40.

Ten autumns at ridge height

There is no weather station on Caw Ridge. What follows is the ERA5 reanalysis, a reconstruction of past weather from every observation available, read at the ridge point and adjusted to 1991 m, for the autumns of 2016 to 2025. It is a model of the past and smooths the extremes, the wind most of all. At the waypoint, 707 m lower, add about 5 degrees to every temperature.

In the week of 29 Sep, an average day on the ridge runs from -3° at night to 4° in the afternoon. The coldest night in the record for that week was -19°C. New snow fell on 26% of days, and the day's strongest gust averaged 45 km/h. By the first week of November the average afternoon is below freezing.

Wind

When the snow comes

Natural Resources Canada has read every clear Landsat and Sentinel-2 image of seven winters and worked out, for each 30 m cell in the country, when the snow arrived. At your two points:

A satellite sees the ground only between clouds, so each date is the midpoint between the last snow free view and the first white one. Where the gap was more than a fortnight the date is marked and should be set aside. In the winters with a good record the first snow came to the ridge point between 23 Sep and 21 Oct, and to the waypoint between 23 Sep and 9 Nov. In most of those winters the two dates fall within a week of each other: the first storm of the autumn whitens the valley and the ridge together. On a windswept crest the snow also leaves again: the ridge can blow bare in a chinook and whiten the next night.

Legal light, sun and moon

Times are for the waypoint on a level horizon, in clock time. Legal hunting hours run from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset. Clocks go back one hour on Sunday 1 November 2026.

First and last light are civil twilight, when the sun is six degrees below the horizon and there is enough light to walk by. Computed with the NOAA solar equations; good to about a minute. The terrain horizon is not counted, so the sun itself will show later and leave earlier in a basin.