A daydream come true

 During the summer months I spend a lot of time driving north of Revelstoke. The road we use is a paved road that travels beside the Columbia river for 150 km before it turns to dirt road. The whole time we are driving on the East Side;the Selkirks, and we are offered amazing views of the West side, The Monashees. So we all daydream about how one day we could canoe across and tour up one of these beauties.

 Well yesterday we finally did. A daydream come true. Aaron, Ian and myself canoed across the lake and toured up towards Hat Peak. From the road the bottom bit has always looked challenging but from a skinning point of view it all unfolded perfectly. Tight hemlock forest quickly opened up into large Cedar groves and then soon enough we were working our way up an open avi path and into the alpine.

 The tour into the alpine worked out beautifully, from a distance it all appeared large and forbidding but as we got closer it grew smaller and very manageable. Small pieces of terrain linked together to bring us higher and higher, till soon enough we were boot packing up the final pitch to the ridge. I had hopes that we would be able to summit and ski off Hat  peak but when we crested the ridge it was obvious that the last 200 feet was beyond our levels. And  not skiable.

So we turned our tips down and skied 7700 feet to the lake. I am going to have to do some research but I think that is the longest decent I have done around Revelstoke.  We skied from 9600 feet down to 1875 feet, and almost all of it was great skiing, the first few hundred feet was a little hard and the last 300 feet was a little bushy but all in all incredible descent.

In 2004 Aaron, Ian and myself  ski traversed the entire northern Monashees in 2004, a 21 day, 100 000 foot  untraversed mountain range. Since that trip none of us have stood on top of a summit in the northern monashees. So it was great to stand near a summit and gaze at the entire traverse we had done. To stand there the three of us and reminisce about that incredible trip we were on years ago. Fantastic.