It takes a special person to enjoy
backcountry skiing in spring. At lower elevations snow is patchy,
and approaches involve a whole gamut of modes of locomotion most of
which only loosely resemble skiing. There is walking with skis in
hand, walking with skis on packs, boot packing a mix of snow and dry
ground, plunging thigh deep through rotten snow, battling bush, and
finally, skiing through forest where tree wells, rocks, stumps, and
logs have melted out while snow falling off trees has frozen hard
into death cookies. Creek crossings, with melted out snow bridges
and streams surging with spring run-off add to the fun.
Most trips at this time of year along
the Sea to Sky Highway seem to involve hours of this kind of fun
before you finally emerge into the alpine where the skiing is
relatively straight-forward and suddenly it all feels worthwhile.
The approach to Metal Dome - a 2070
metre summit with a small north facing glacier on the west side of
the Callaghan Valley started easily enough. We parked our minivan -
now called the "hashtag van" (for #vanlife) - at the bottom
of an old logging road that runs up the south side of Callaghan Creek
to around 850 metres and started out on skis. The logging road was
freshly snowcat groomed as a commercial operation that runs "dog
sled, snowcatskiing, snowmobiling, fondue" tours - I am not
kidding - was still operational.
Logging roads usually go uphill, often
quite steeply, this one is a bit of an anomaly as it gains only 150
metres over 4 kilometres which, if you passed kindergarten
mathematics is all the information you need to know that this will be
slow ski out.
We shuffled up the logging road, the
one day spring window of good weather had closed and cloud was
increasing and thickening. The road ends in a cutblock which we
skied up, trending north and looking for a spot to cross the main
creek draining the Metal Dome glacier. On the 1:50K topographic map
this creek looks innocuous enough, but, in reality, it is carved into
a deep gully and contains a series of small waterfalls. Most of the
snow bridges were long gone, but we finally found a remnant bridge
which we tentatively skied across.
On the north side of the creek, the
terrain is folded and braided with small cliffs, short steep slopes,
tall trees, draws, drops and drainages, none of which are represented
on the map which just shows a smoothly rising slope to the alpine.
Given the advanced state of the spring melt, the terrain made for
slow progress.
We had been weaving about for 2 hours
when we stopped for lunch in a clearing with a patch of brighter, but
not quite sunny sky above us. Considering we had been on the move
for 3 hours we had gained a depressing amount of elevation. At the
end of the fourth hour we finally reached open sub-alpine slopes and
could see the surrounding mountains, and up towards the summit of
Metal Dome.
With 700 metres of elevation gain
remaining, we would be another two hours to the summit, and Doug, who
is generally more optimistic about ski descents than me, thought the
ski out might take 3 hours. This would put us back well into
darkness, and crashing down half covered cutblocks in impending
nightfall would add an entirely new dimension to this ski trip.
So, instead of going for the summit, we
skied up onto a knoll, had some more food and drink while pondering
the robustness of most Coast Range ski trips.
We left our skins on for the first few
hundred metres as we had to skin back up a small ridge we had skied
down, but then we took our skins off and hoped for the best. The
first 100 or 200 metres was actually quite fun, open slopes, soft
snow, snappily turning short skis, then we were into the trees and we
began dodging death cookies and big tree wells. I had two
spectacular crashes were my skis stopped dead after hitting a death
cookie and I got thrown forward, but mostly, we managed surprisingly
well - lock down heels truly are a thing of beauty.
Of course, the lower we got, the more
frozen, crusty and forest litter covered became the snow. We found
our remnant snowbridge, and a little more descending hard snow and we
were out in the cutblock and then onto the road. We ate the last
food in our lunch bags standing at the end of the road as snowmobile
tour arrived.
The guide, unashamedly told us "these
guys can't drive, you better get out of the way," so we shuffled
off the track to allow the faceless sheoples to turn their
snowmobiles around. We stared at each other - two groups
traditionally at odds. Sitting on a snowmobile driving up an almost
flat logging road struck me as utterly boring, and yet hours of heavy
work skiing up through forest to almost immediately turn around and
come down again is also a conquest of the useless.
And, predictably, primary school
mathematics was correct, the logging road was a slow ski down.
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