Rogers Pass - February 23-24, 2005
And so that's where we went, and it was delicious. In fact, probably the best food I ate on the entire trip. It was a place that looked like a house, on the main street, cross-street probably 11th or 12th. Actually, upon re-reading this, given the name of the restaurant, I bet it's between 10th and 11th.
We stayed at the Best Western at Rogers Pass that night, and the next morning had a horrible breakfast at the cafe there. Pretty much everything was bad: eggs, sausage, pancakes, ham, coffee. Only the french toast was good. I had forgotten how much the food sucked there! We realized that we were near the the beginning of a downfall in food, lodging and snow conditions, from the apex at Chatter Creek.
Instead, we enjoyed variable conditions dropping east from the highest easily-accessible point on the ridgeline. The snow ranged from breakable crust to nice steep sloughing powder. The pictures make it look better than it actually was. Lots of old tracks dropping off this ridge, but we were still able to easily find a clean line.
If the pink purse was still around, I might have won it with my "flailamarking"... Vincent swore he saw the tails of my skis hit my head in one of my head-over-heels wipeouts. I really should just give up telemarking and switch to boarding or AT.
Then we climbed up the broad south-facing slope to Bruins Pass. Bill arrived first and started booting up to the peak, to ski the steep east face. No way I was doing that on tele gear! Vincent arrived and we watched him come down - he said the snow was really great, but it was a little steeper than he thought - over 45 degrees in one section.
From here, the shaded east-facing slopes in the next basin over looked like a better bet for the descent. At least it would bring us into new terrain.
Damn why didn't I bring my snowboard? The conditions tested us with a nasty mix of breakable crust and powder. Follow the good textured snow for 100ft, until a smooth surface presented itself all around - oh no! the unavoidable crust!
Soon we were engaged in survival skiing down the exit of the bowl, in tight trees in chewed up, tracked up suncrust. What is this, the Cascades!? The trail miles went quickly, and soon we were back at the Best Western.
Time for dinner. It wasn't very good. And what is up with the uniforms they make the female employees wear there!??
Time to check out the hottub. It was a cement depression, barely luke-warm, under a large white worm-like tent that also housed a swimming pool. The roof dripped cold water anytime anyone opened or closed the door. O how the mighty have fallen.
Vincent said he was feeling a little under the weather. By the time we arrived at the Mousetrap, he said he was not going to be able to make it, and that he would just turn around here. We arranged a meeting time, between 4pm and 5pm at the Asulkan trailhead. We hoped to be skiing out to the Loop Brook trailhead, but figured it would be easier to meet at a place we both knew, and we heard it was an easy ski back along the highway to the Asulkan TH from Loop Brook.
From the Mousetrap, it was a 3000ft ascent up to the col. The slopes above the Mousetrap looked like a ski resort - the most skied out backcountry I've ever seen in my life. As we got higher, the tracks became fewer. That is until we made a long rightward traverse towards the Dome Glacier, when they multiplied again. Strange, was this sifted snow that had filled the old skin track we were following. It looked like winddrift, but it was rock hard. And yet the snow outside the skin track was soft powder. Very strange.
We passed some sweet tracks coming off the Asulkan glacier - nice knolly terrain, and the snow looked great.
In a silent steady plod, without stopping for more than a minute, Bill and I arrived at the col about two and a half hours after leaving the Mousetrap.
Here were some folks coming up the other side. They all had full on glacier gear. Hmm, what were we getting ourselves into? I had assumed the Lily glacier was pretty benign. Ah, maybe this is a guided group. "Where are you guys from?", I asked. Ahh, one from Canmore, and all the others from New England.
Bill and I sat on the col with the others, soaked in the scenery, and re-energized ourselves with bread and baba-ganoujh from Overwaitea, which had mayonnaise as the first ingredient. I did not know that mayonnaise was Middle-eastern cuisine.
Incidentally, if you're curious about the origin of the name of the Overwaitea grocery stores, we were told that it is an old business, from when tea was really important. It stands for "overweight tea", since they sold, for example, 14 units of tea, for the standard price of 13 units.
Eventually I got anxious to go down, and I strapped on my board and slid over to the gully on the west side. It was only a couple hundred feet to flatter terrain off the west side of the ridge, but the gully looked a little rocky and steepened convexly out of view.
Bill, on skis, came over to check it out, and mentioned that the guide had been short-roping one of the clients up this slope (which I had not noticed). Hmm. All the ski touring maps show "the way" to get from the Asulkan to the Loop drainage is to go over Sapphire col (to our south), but it looked steeper on the map. The park Warden had confirmed the col we were at was an easier route. But it was a little intimidating. Maybe it's usually filled with snow?
Bill hopped and inched his way down. "I'm not sure your board will fit through these rocks, you might have to downclimb".
I grabbed a pole for self-arrest, and side-slipped down, and found a way to sneak through the rocks further left. Ok, no problem.
Now we were on the gentle slopes of the Lily Glacier, and we made nice cruiser turns for the next 2500 vertical feet, dropping from the warm sunshine into the cool shady valley. The snow here was not very deep, but it was also mostly powder - less windcrust than the slopes near Balu Pass.
The moraines below provided some route-finding issues, but there were a multitude of tracks to follow. The guide had warned that it was impossible to ski the drainage, and that there were sections that were too steep to ski, which we would have to boot pack. This belied the map, which showed a gentle straightforward descent.
At a creek-crossing, we finally hit the spot where presumably they had boot-packed, but it was no problem on a descent. Just icy ski-resort style slopes above a running creek. Quite soon, we were back at the highway. It was about 4pm. We looked for a way to ski along the highway, but it seemed it was all brown snowplow seracs in between the highway and the trees. Hmm.
A game of Roshambo determined that Bill would be the one to hitchhike. After trying for several minutes without success, we finally got a promise of a ride from some other tourers who had just got back. Soon they were on their way with Bill, and I was left to wait in the cooling temperatures.
At the Asulkan trailhead, there was no sign of Vincent. So they continued to the pass and dropped Bill off. Bill assumed he'd find Vince drinking at the bar or something. At about that same time, Vincent arrived from the west, from an afternoon in Revelstoke, and checked the Asulkan trailhead. No Bill. Meanwhile, back at the pass, Bill could not find Vincent or Vincent's car, so he started hiking back down to the trailhead (a couple of miles away). Meanwhile, at the Look Brook trailhead, Phil was getting colder. Eventually, Vince met up with Bill (not clear on the whole story), and Phil was picked up, and everyone was happy.