Extreme Backcountry

In what seems to have become an occasional tradition, three of my Saskatchewan friends and I made the long trek in to the Stanley Mitchell Hut, about 20 km by ski deep inside Yoho National Park.

The ski season in general has been affected by warmer weather earlier than normal and a protracted period of no new snow. Recent ski experience around here has been made rather unpleasant by breakable crust, muddy roads, icy ski runs and no new powder snow. Gardening, on the other hand, is in high gear....

Part of the long slog in was made much easier and faster thanks to a tow from a maintenance snowmobile, so a 10-hour trip was reduced to about 5 hours. One stretch of steep ski track was pure hell, if that term can be applied to 2 km of icy, crusty crap. It was NOT fun.

Our arrival at the hut was followed by the start of a major new snow dump which kept up all night and all the next day, giving us the powder we'd been missing. Unfortunately, there was so much new snow that you really needed a steep slope to build up any speed, given all the new snow you were pushing out of the way. Even my skis, the ones I call my "Fat Broads" (and that's not a mis-spelling - you need to see the design on the skis to understand this one, or use your imagination...), sank well down out of sight. The telemark skiers were having a difficult time. Trail-breaking even on level ground was an exhausting business. Any uphill trail-breaking reduced one to a gasping, dripping wet noodle in minutes.

As we ventured out from low-angle terrain to steeper, treed slopes, what we'd been expecting all along became quite clear. Any steep slope worth skiing on was a potential avalanche site. Indeed we saw several slides and by Saturday morning, everything was sliding. The general group consensus was we'd never seen such extreme avalanche danger. And here we were, right in the middle of it.

I celebrated the beautiful location by coming down with the start of a cold, so after taking 2 hours to break a trail in the new snow down the valley trail, I lay around the hut all of Saturday keeping hydrated, keeping warm and watching new snow slides come down. The rest of the group toured around the valley bottom, keeping out of trouble.

The trip out on Sunday was relatively quick - 5 hours this time, with the new snow making that icy hill I mentioned earlier quite manageable and not adding to the trail-breaking chores too much. Lower down, the last couple of km to the parking lot, the road was an icy, crusty mess, apparently the remnants of conditions that were responsible for several accidents on the TCH a day earlier. With all clothing wet and smelly, all that remained was the drive home where I get to nurse my head cold for a few days before I get back to gardening. It may be time to hang up the skis for the season.