Great Fishing
Wow when we threw our nets out I, hoped, but never figured we would net the big fish we did! Things went amazingly well considering the weather and objectives.
We left town at 4.20 and then started touring from the Illecileweat around 5 am. At Asulkan pass by 8.30. I have never skied down Asulkan and it was great, some decent dust on crust turns and then hard melt freeze crust to the bottom. Which was great considering what we were skiing down, at one point I caught an edge and found myself sliding head first down the crust. All went well and we were touring up by 9am. At 10 we met up with the Golden gang, who were camping, and headed off as a group.
Staring up the Comstock we could all see that it went but knew we had a lot of challenges before we even got to the top of the ultimate line. We toured up to twisted rock and then down onto the Selwyn glacier and up to the Selwyn/Hasler col.
From there we climbed up and over a little bump and worked our way over to Hasler. This is when things got interesting. Here is Conor "a la cheval".
Hasler is the second highest summit in the Selkirks and a prize well worth waiting for. We scurried across the ridge till we were finally on the summit. Sitting there at 5pm it was almost 12 hours of hard work to get there and so little time to enjoy it. We were on the fence as to go forward towards the Comstock or back the way we had come. Mark was very determined and worked us down the ridge and to the top of the Comstock. I could not believe it, we were standing on top of the Comstock looking down thousands of feet to the valley. It was a little whiteout but the rocks that bordered the chute gave us perspective. Soon enough we were in it and leap frogging 6 people down the biggest unskied line in the area. The snow was perfect, tightened but very carveable, but we were hesitant that at any point it could change to glacial ice, so we skied with our ice axes at the ready. But the snow remained perfect and we finally exited the choke and skied out the fan.
The highest point between Golden and Revelstoke gets skied by both towns together. A unity of strengths. Pretty amazing. I also got some of the best footage of the year.
Yesterday morning we woke up and started touring up towards Mt-Fox, the sun was shinning and it looked like a perfect morning. Soon enough the clouds rolled in and we were high up in the whiteout. But being so close to the 17 highest summit we couldn’t stop ourselves and we booted up to the summit by 2.pm
The skies cleared just in time for our descent down the Nface of Fox. I missed the bench I was aiming for and was a little lower than I wanted but it all worked out with a deep powdery descent down the face.
It’s wild that we can get so lucky. Sitting at the bottom of the face we were blown away by our last two days. Perseverance and stubborness seem to really help in achieving lofty goals. But it was far from over we still had to tour up the Geiki glacier and get home.
The whiteout got thicker as we toured up the glacier and I started to tour us towards the east when we wanted to go west. Things started to feel funny as the wind and sun changed direction so we stopped and pulled out the GPS. It showed us off track and we started heading West towards Young peak so that we could ski Forever Young. By 7 pm we were at the col, I was supposed to be home by now so Tracey could go to a staggette and have some girly time. But I was far from home and hated that I had screwed up her freedom. What an asshole!
We skied forever Young, a 1500 foot couloir and headed home. Beaten and tired we were psyched to be in the car. Mission accomplished, big fish caught.
Frenchman’s Cap
My last movie was called mountain animals, I wish i had kept that title for today’s adventures. We canoed across the lake to access Frenchman’s cap, a very dramatic summit that towers over the lake. The drainage we accessed, park creek, is a seldom visited, very primordial drainage. Huge cliffs border the creek the whole way up and massive trees fill the valley bottom.
First off we stumbled upon some old wolf tracks, then some fresh Wolverine tracks, around a corner we found a tree that a piliated wood pecker was in the process of destroying. Then we toured onto a kill, or what was left of a moose, which was exactly a lot of fur, some blood and two pelvic bones; there were lots of wolf tracks all round this area. Further on some marten tracks and then we saw that we had scared a wolverine up the valley, he ended up climbing up to a high col to the west of our high point! Then on the ridge I stumbled onto some Goat tracks that came up and out of a dramatic chute. and finally a bald eagle soared over us as we were getting ready to canoe home. Mountain animals everywhere.
The tour up was amazing, a little longer in the valley than I had hoped, but when we were standing under our run none of us had any complaints. The north facing snow looked amazing and the line looked awesome. The tour up was huge, straight up and around till we finally spotted the summit. There seemed to be no easy way up to it so we climbed as high as we could and then skied our line.
What a line it was, a large chute bordered by impressive peaks, with perfectly settled snow the whole way down.A Very remoteline that most likely has never been skied before. Awesome turns the whole way down and then a great canoe home…. A great adventure.
