When we left for Cathedral Mountain the avalanche rating for North East facing slopes was not good. Since this was a North East facing ascent we did not have high hopes of summiting. We skied up the Lake O'Hara road and crossed the creek to Cathedral Mountain. We followed preexisting tracks to a valley leading up to the ascent gully. Once past the trees, we did some snow stability tests to see what we were up against. We were getting results on the easy side of moderate. The instabilities that existed would propagate across a slope and cause a huge avalanche if triggered. Rather than risking the gully we opted to head back down the valley a bit and ascend the forest to the top of a ridge bypassing the gully. The forest had some ski tracks to follow which were tremendously helpful. The few times when I had to break trail without tracks were pretty brutal. Once we reached treeline we could see that some avalanches had already occurred on a slope ahead of us. We skied around to the South facing side of the slope to check it out. We turned around after checking out the South facing side of the slope since we couldn't see what slopes above the small one we were on looked like. It took us a long time to break trail to where we were and we would not have had time to reach the summit even if conditions had been much better. The descent back through the forest was brutal. The forest was thick and steep and I fell over a lot. We had a nice ski down the Lake O'Hara road once we reached it
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