Boulder 2/3

Sitting in the Adamants lodge last week, you could watch the sun rise on Downie peak and its neighbour Boulder peaks. This view made me want to hike up and ski around the glaciated summits.

So this morning Aaron and I drove up from Revelstoke, 100 km, and then drove in a logging road 20 km and then looked directly up 6500 feet to the summits. Huge relief. 

We put our heads down and worked up through thousands of feet of great skiing. North facing the snow was good above 4500 feet, still cold and creamy. By 1.15 pm we were on Boulder 3 and looking down its steep north face. We tipped our skis down this 50* face and enjoyed some steep faceted turns.

So much fun to ski a random 50 degree Nface in the middle of nowhere, most likely never skied before. Yah never know though.

We then headed up and skied off Boulder 2, which was excellent and tumbled from the summit down 6500feet to the truck.

What was so great about this tour was the relative lack of bushwacking, none really. we followed a logging road for 30 minutes and then went directly up. Awesome day, epic.   610 000ft

CMH Heli assisted ski touring

Well its as plush as you could imagine. Wake up enjoy a great breakfast, a few espressos and grab your ready made lunch. Heli picks you up at 9 am and drops you in some remote area nowhere near yesterdays adventures. Tour up through forests and alpine bowls, enjoy great April powder, get picked up by a heli and dropped back at the lodge. Snack, hot tube, great meal, sleep in comfort and repeat.  It was an amazing way to get into ski touring, not something a dedicated ski tourer like me would do often but damn was it good. On our last day we got really close to Sir Sandford, the highest mountain in our range, 11555 ft.

And now I am bakc at home and enjoying some good turns while balancing family time. The wife and kids take off for three weeks soon, so I am skiing early and playing with kids most of the day. Except today..

We headed up Video peak, skied the north line, which was decent considering the high temperatures we are experiencing. We then toured up and summitted Ursus Major and skied  the north line off of it. Again creamy and buttery but not deep. and then up and down the corn up south facing Bruins bowl and home. Ahh it felt so nice to stand on a summit or two.

Bonney Glacier

After our day up Connaught we decided to go somewhere that the wind may not have wrecked. So we headed up Loop brook and skied the morraine runs. The skiing was epic, so different from the previous day. Tommy,a photographer from Backcountry.com was up taking photos and I hoped we would get some in the Bonney.  It is such a magnificent place, we could get him some decent shots there.

We had some perfect powder, hero skiing, and occasionally we had some sun to accompany this great skiing. Needing my extra vert I pushed through a whiteout and we had one of the best runs of the year. Knowing it was so good we headed up again on Thursday and went deeper into the glacier for some great turns, a little whiteout and flat at times but really great. And then we headed up the climbers left glacier towards Mt-Clarke

This was a really exciting glacial up, with big junks of blue glacier all around us. Super fun and then a fun down, some where I had never been. Yet somewhere I will surely return.

All’s well otherwise, just sitting up in the comforts of CMH and enjoying some Heli assisted ski touring. More on that to come.