After following the summer Helen Lake trail for 650m, we turned off onto a skin track heading to the left (north). It climbed up to the top of the first bench. Which you follow for a short distance.

Here we are facing the bouldery slope at the benches northern end. Matt's route I was trying to follow turned off just before here. Not noticing I continued along this skin track.

After much debate about what to do on this weekend Becky suggested Crystal Ridge. I immediately agreed. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it myself, but its been on my snowshoe list for a long time. Last year I tried to ski it, but didn't like conditions (avy, cloud cover, etc) and turned around. This year there isn't enough snow cover to consider skiing here yet (for me), and a recent report on facebook noted the skiing was quite bad in this area. So it was an easy decision to go on snowshoes. Since Becky would be anyway.