Skiing Ice Creek Lodge

We have had the good fortune to have gone to a lot of different great huts in British Columbia in search of (yet more) powder skiing:  Golden Alpine Holidays, Valhalla Mountain Touring, Stanley Mitchell, Sorcerer Lodge, Sol Mountain Lodge, Carlyle Lodge, Kokanee, and Valhalla Lodge, but we hadn't been to Ice Creek Lodge in the Valhalla Mountains (which is one of the many sub-ranges of the Selkirks; this part is north of Nelson, which in turn is north of Spokane, WA).  Every year when I'm sitting at home after another day of great skiing in the Wasatch and I get invited on next year's BC hut trip I wonder why I travel 1000 miles to go skiing when we have such great skiing here, and every year I get done and say "wow, I am so glad I went again!"  And of course, this year was no different.

Skiing Rogers Pass is great, but driving the car every day, staying in a resort town, and bouncing off of other people does detract a bit from the experience, and thus it was great when the helicopter dropped us off:

our own personal helib-blizzard

And realized quickly that we had basically an entire Central Wasatch-sized area with about 1.3 gazillon acres of really awesome terrain all to ourselves

The weather had worked out well for us; the rain that had hit Rogers had fallen as snow at the higher elevation of the Ice Creek Lodge, and the visibility had kept the prior group mostly in the trees and close to the lodge, so we arrived to an almost completely clean slate.  And we lapped it up.

We had heard that the terrain at Ice Creek was pretty big and real, and we were not disappointed.  There are 1500-2500 lines all over the place:

that obvious line in the center was over 2500 feet long.

And the truth is that it would likely be a pretty challenging place to spend a week if it was puking snow and the stability was sketchy.  And when you have to book 2 years in advance (they are full for 2018 already) you have to hope for the best.  Fortunately, we did indeed have good stability, and were able to go fairly big, with some good snow.  Jeannie and Jonny layin' it down:

Our resident telemarker Colter was layin' it down as well

and opening it up a bit

"I'm flying!"

Until he wasn't!

Brother Paul using his racer background to avoid Colter's sizeable sitzmark

One of the things I love about Canada are the rocks.  They create great little jumps:

Colter thinking he can fly again

And make some skin tracks really aesthetic

and can create some dramatic outcroppings

This line went into kind of a no man's land pretty far from the hut; Paul did the first probe:

And I followed:

And below it rolled over and looked like it cliffed out, so we did a big traverse to get over to a line that we could see went through.  However, looking back up, we realized that there were multiple great options to flush through

we started at the little notch in the center of the pic and couldn't see those lower chutes; next time!

Many days ended with a fairly long slog back up to the lodge

And then we had a few chores, like getting water:

But each morning, our resident conehead was ready to charge out again:

We got out and skinned up

Ash in her element

Mike humping over a cornice that doesn't seem very similar to the terrain in his Cincinnati home

And did some skiing

We got some good steeps:

And found some supah deep powder on one of the best 1800 foot tree runs we'd ever skied:

Greg's shot of Jonny got the pic of the week award.

There are also some coolies:

I was pretty stoked about this one:

There were some strange characters:

This is actually not an exaggeration of Greg's physique!

It's nice to have myself around myself to crack myself up

And we got fueled by some great food

If you bring salmon for 10 people, make sure you bring enough for leftover salmon sammies!

Another thing I love about BC is its propensity to create what I call huffalumps:  the snow that stacks up on trees, and stumps, etc.  And the relationship between Huffalump size and the (small) size of the "trigger" (a nudge from a pole) is important.  Here - with the benefit of rapid-firing pics to document it - Jonny gets a good'n.

With some good viz we could see the craggy Devil's range that harbors some big lines:

The day we flew out a trio of us went out to ski what the hut owners call "The Money Line"; we had to get an early start:

And the 2000 foot line -with a steep roll in the middle  - lived up to its name

The helicopter flew in with the next crew, and as they walked down to the hut one of the people said "Hi Tom!"  Turns out it was Becky Bristow, who I paddled with in Ecuador back in 1999!

Great to see Becky after far too long!

And thus we were done.  Thanks again to Tom Orsini who had the vision two years ago to book this hut for this high-value mid-February week, and thanks again to the great - and unusually strong! - crew of Ash, Lara, Mike, Colter, Jeannie, Greg, Jonny, and Paul.  

good skiers, good skinners, good scrabble players, and hilarious smart folks!

Skiing Rogers Pass

The Wasatch has some great backcountry skiing, but Canada….Oh Canada!  The Columbia Mountains – which is the grand lot of the Selkirks, Monashees, Bugaboos, and probably a bunch of other major mountain ranges that I can’t even remember  -has many, many lifetimes’ worth of terrain,  a comparable intermountain snow pack, and it’s all BIG!  There are lots of great huts to fly into for ski touring, there are some great ski resorts, and of course there’s the famous heli skiing, but for approachable glorious day outings that are BIG there’s no place like Rogers Pass. 

My first time to Rogers was an eon or two ago when we had a bit of time after flying out of the Golden Alpine Holidays huts and we did a quick little tour up the awkwardly-named Illecillewaet Glacier, where I got my first taste of the Rogers bigness.  Mount Sir Donald looms high above...everything, including the road:

And while there aren't many/any ski lines off that (the left horizon is a long, exposed 5.4 route) the surrounding skiing is endless.  It took a few years to get back there, but around 2001 or so Ash and I spent a couple of weeks exploring the area, staying at the iconic - but pretty beat  -Best Western lodge that straddled the pass.  It was a sweet but strange deal:  you had to specify getting the "Skier's Special" when you checked in to get the $25/night rate (if you didn't say the magic words it was substantially more) and the rooms were pretty cheesy Best Western-like, and the food was famously bad, even by skid ski bum standards, but the ability to stumble outside and flop your skinned skis on the ground and march up the Connaught drainage to 3000 foot avy paths was worth every drawback.   And there was a bar, where Ash and I spent a memorable evening once talking with (yelling at the very deaf) Fred Beckey,  within site of one of the innumerable "Beckey" routes.  It was interesting to watch him hit on Ashley; his flirting seems to be as famous as his climbing!  

Since then the venerable Best Western has closed, and now the only lodging is in Revelstoke or Golden, 35 and 45 minutes away, respectively.  Supposedly some ambitious guy wants to try to revive it, but apparently it has literally given way to the harsh environment and any revitalization would start with razing the existing building then dealing with the complex rules of Glacier National Park.  So for now you gotta either drive up or stay at the nearby dreary Wheeler Hut or march for hours up to the beautiful Asulkan hut.  

Mike Elovitz and Greg Hanlon  -two good federal government employees who love to recreate hard on their prodigious taxpayer-subsidized vacation plans  -and I only had a few days to ski there before we met flew into the Ice Creek, but any days at Rogers are invariably great.  One of the hardest things to do once there is decide where to go; between the hugey terrain, the avy danger, the weather, the popularity, and the national park permit system it can be a bit overwhelming, but we were able to go up the very popular McGill Shoulder and go just a few mins farther than the rest of the gagglers through some unlikely-looking terrain 

And found some nice untracked turns

Everything's big in Canada, including the crazy snow Huffalumps!

The next day we were excited to reconnect with our old friend Russell The Love Muscle Lybarger.  Russ had been our guide at Golden Alpine Holidays 6 or 7 times, and is the consummate guide: safe, fun, super fit, super safe, remembers more jokes and old clients' names than anyone should be able to, plays a mean "Brown Eyed Girl" and "American Pie" on his guitar and mouth harp simultaneously, and his love for skiing and mountains is infectious.  Back in the day his influence almost - but not quite! - convinced me to quit a real job and become a ski guide.  For all our New England, Portland, and SLC friends who have had the great pleasure of skiing with Russ back in the day, know that he's still at it and lovin it!

We did a classic tour up the Asulkan drainage to Dome Peak for a coupla runs:

and then topped out on the col between the Dome Glacier and the Lily Glacier (we were accompanied by a few Italians who were sporting harnesses and ice screws; we weren't sure what pile of snow they were going to use those in!).  The entrance to the Lily involved a quick down-boot:

We probably shoulda skied it, but it was pretty bulletproof from windblasting

And then it was 400 feet of goodness that loomed below:

the good Dr Mike layin down the line

Greg given'er near some cool cliff bands looming above

resting burning quads

Our grand weather did not hold for the next day, however, and things got a bit foggy:

and damp:

Whodathunk we'd need skin wax in Canada in mid-February?  

Snowpacks don't much like rapid change, and with temps soaring above freezing and plenty of "precip" happening we ended up with a forced rest day in damp Revelstoke:

So it goes!  

We then headed back south to meet the gang for the next stage of the adventure, taking a cool ferry along the way:

It had been long enough since I'd been at Rogers that the details of my memory were a little fuzzy and I've had the good fortune to ski plenty of good big terrain since I was last there, but this trip was a good reminder that regardless of many other great ski options in BC, Rogers Pass still rules!  Thanks again to Russ for making the time to meet up with a few old time clients, and if you ever need anyone to help you navigate the hugeness of Rogers or a sweet place to stay let me know and I'll put you in touch with him.  And thanks to Greg for taking some of the nice pics above.