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.<\/p>\n
A couple weekends ago, things were starting to look right. Inclement weather had kept me away, but a fresh dusting up high had me stoked. I headed out, directions in hand to drive to the end of the logging road and ski it the next day. I ended up getting lost, as there were a ton of new cutblocks and roads that weren’t on Google Earth. Then it started raining lightly so I thought it pointless anyways, no freeze = no go on a steep face. I still hadn’t had a good look at it by this point, there is a sub peak and ridge in the way that obscures the lower face from most angles. So I went out again the next day (June 21) to do it all over, this time with better notes. I continued on past my road purposely, to another road which accesses a ridge with a view via a short bushwhacking hike. There I finally got a sense of Foster’s true nature.<\/p>\n
What I understood from the beta I gathered before going, was that the upper west face went to both the lower west face (left of the little ridge dividing the face) and the lower south-west face (right). Seeing the whole thing with my own eyes though, the SW face was only accessible from the summit with a long, steep, exposed traverse, neutering the best part of the whole thing: the steep turns high on the face. The lower west face obviously isn’t in, still hopeful it can go with the right snow. So I had to choose, go for it anyways or go home. I decided to go for it since I was here anyways, and went to sleep in the car. At 3am the following morning, I got all the usual junk together to start hiking up the few clicks of bushwhacking up the ravine to snowline below the face , but then a few seconds after turning my headlamp, the beam wavered and died. No replacement batteries, gutted. I had two decisions, either wait for a couple more hours to have enough light to navigate by (hiking up a steep ravine in the dark is a great way to break a leg), and by doing so be a couple hours later and a couple hours hotter on a face which was already pushing my boundaries of acceptable sketch; or go home. I went home and licked my wounds, worried that I was losing my ability to concoct new, exciting lines and pull it off.<\/p>\n
I can see this sucker plain as day from work when driving in the Kootenay valley north-bound. It’s a long ways off, but just last week I saw a boatload of snow in the bowls still, and a snowy couloir heading up to the summit ridge. I headed in yesterday with no objective in mind, just going loose. No point getting all worked up when I had never been there before, lots of things could go wrong. There is an old mining road heading up to 2200m that can be seen in Google Earth, that’s what I planned on heading up on. I expected that 6km\/ 800 vertical meters away from the end of the road I’d be forced to stop and do the rest on foot, so I brought the bike just in case it would be decent riding for the way back down. I’m not using a truck (yet..) or ATV to access this stuff after all so finding the limits of my car’s off-roading ability is always possible. To my surprise and delight the road was great driving. Probably the steepest continuous hill I’ve driven up, it was nice to see a really well built road that doesn’t wash off the mountain easily.<\/p>\n