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.<\/p>\n
Load up the packs, load up the truck, drive to Radium and then west into the mountains. I had been up Horsethief Creek in the summer doing some scouting, and remembered vaguely that there was something funky about the access, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The only thing that really stuck with me was how ridiculously steep the valley walls were, and how any attempt at summer skiing would quite dangerous on the access. Anyways, we kept following the signs that said Forster-Horsethief, and ended up at the sled parking lot for Forster, with Horsethief drainage being back down the road a bit. Ian was rightly afraid of going back down the slick icy road against the regular flow of traffic for that time of day, so we decided to sled down the road to get back to Horsethief. And it was a good call, we met a few trucks on the way up and it doubtless would’ve been a bad scene if they didn’t have radios.<\/p>\n
The road up Horsethief was great, a bit of fresh snow without much bad woomphing underneath, we put miles down quick and the sleds stayed cool. But, as soon as sleds are added to any equation, things always go wrong in great number. After we made our way up Farnham Creek and got to our presumed drainage to gain the hanging valley we were to camp in, Ian realized that a pocket was open on his backpack, containing unimportant things like food. So we ripped back down the road in search of Ian’s junk, after doubling back 30km we finally found it all.<\/p>\n
So we went back up to Farnham Creek. There is remarkably little snow in there at 1600m, it seemed like before this fresh snow the road would’ve been mud riding in quite a few places. We found a good looking place to start our valley bottom thrash from and started up on skins. We found some flagging tape and followed it, it seems to mark some sort of hiking trail, probably for climbers. Anyways, it was very steep and bushy, and the snowpack non-existent in places. Eventually though, we broke into alpine and were amazed at this place. It was very reminiscent of the Rockies, from the flora of stunted, scratchy conifers and dry, dead soil on the way up to the big quartzite monoliths to the moraines and boulder fields blown down to rock, the area seems very out of sorts compared to the icy peaks and deep moss just a dozen km west.<\/p>\n