This weekend’s sled access ridiculousness was Mt Farnham. No, not Farnham Glacier, but the mountain, the tallest mountain in the Purcell mountains. As the Purcells are kind of my home range with Kicking Horse located within, it’s a little bit extra personal. Continue reading Mount Farnham
Tag Archives: obscure
Beaver Glacier Camp
I’ve been looking at Beaver Mountain for a while. I think I saw it from the Dogtooth Range in late season-July a few years back, and its north face looked like it should be a perfect steep canvas of white in winter. Of course, that isn’t the case, it’s a traffic jam of seracs trying to escape the face to join with the glacier below, but I didn’t know that at the time and it was a nice image in my head. Ever since, I’ve been interested in getting back there. The project has been on the backburner for a while, slowly becoming more tangible and less of just a ski bum’s daydream as I gained the skills needed to realize the fantasy. Last week, weather was looking good and stability was great, so two days before we were set to leave I asked Ian if he could make it out. He thought it was an awesome idea, so I booked a couple days off work to make an extra long weekend and started packing. Continue reading Beaver Glacier Camp
Destroyer of Worlds
Destroyer Peak, BC rockies. A pretty small peak of 2700m and change, but somehow maintains a rather large glacier. And two steep rad ice faces on the N and NE flanks. Continue reading Destroyer of Worlds
The Friendship-breaker
Hewitt Peak, the friend-breaker, as I explained to Ryan last weekend. A long, brutal bushwhack to a south facing gulley on a peak that doesn’t have a lot of name cred and then all the way back out. Sure to break a friendship. So it was another solo trip for me. Continue reading The Friendship-breaker
Still Got The Touch
June came and went really fast, it seems. Foster Peak took all the weather windows I had for the month. I wanted one more gnarly line to finish off the spring before firn snow skipping for the rest of the summer. The West Face of Foster beckoned and I was powerless to resist. At 3200m and change it is the biggest peak on the Rockwall, a worthy adversary. Continue reading Still Got The Touch
Tumbling Mountain
After weeks of getting skunked by poor freezes, finally conditions line up perfect and a big line gets skied. Most likely a first descent.
I first noticed this while lounging about at the top of 3/3.5 couloir (commonly called 3/4) at Moraine Lake last year, waiting for the snow to soften up for descent. I didn’t wait long enough and got technical hardpack turns all the way down, but this striking line that I saw from the top stuck in my mind and got tacked onto my to-do list for this year. Continue reading Tumbling Mountain
Mt. Weed
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| Photo: Kevin Annala, used with permission. |
This minor obsession with Mt Weed’s south face/ chutes started around Christmas this year. I was heading home and needed to get a gift for my parents, so I figured why not get something that might help them further understand my fascination with mountains. I can’t really take pictures all that well, so I got em a picture from my buddy Kevin Annala, a Banff based photographer (sure I get nice composures sometimes but then it’s full auto mode baby!). Check out more of his work here: http://www.kevinannalaphotography.com. As I was farting around at home, I noticed some striking lines across the valley. South facing, but still skiable looking in late June or July, despite being super solar. During my poking around around Bow Summit this season, I’ve been taking some pictures of my own to make sure it is in, and I went up today to ski it. Continue reading Mt. Weed
Mt. Niles solo summit
This mountain had never really registered on my radar until I went to ski Sherbrooke lake. It’s just a really cool looking mountain with a wicked looking south face. Not gnarly, just really sweet looking. So since I’m recently parted with my fat freeride-oriented touring setup and just on my 90mm spring setup, I thought it would be a good objective for a fast and light day trip.
It was forecasted to snow the day and night before, and what better conditions for a big face than powder?! However, in order to ski it before the powder turned to wet slide avalanche prone glop or just another sun crust, I had to ski it really early in the morning before the sun had much time on the south aspect. So I woke up at 2am and got to the Great Divide Lodge and skins on by 3:45. Solo trips are nice because you can just plow on and not worry about group dynamics, and get to learn how fast you can really go. I got to the far end of the lake in an hour, and the base of the mountain in another two hours.
Boom Boom
Last spring sometime I noticed a nice looking skiff of snow in a couloir on Boom Mountain using Google Earth. I headed up in late May to see what I could see, but the views were fleeting and inconclusive. It was also obvious it was past season for it too. Over the summer I found a great picture of it, and it’s been on my mind ever since.
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| Photo: Manfred Delong, used with permission |
Fortitude Big Lines
My buddy Ryan and I went yesterday to check out a sick looking face in Fortitude, wow what an adventure. Steep uptracks, cornice tunneling bootpacks, ski traversing a face to get on the line and then by far, the most full-on skiing I’ve ever done.
