Three Huts, One Day

On Saturday March 11, my dad and I ski toured until dark on the Duffy lake road. Before we left I put Leukotape on my blister prone zones on my feet. Having read about this and tried it once I decided to tryout for blister prevention. We left our house at 8:15. Our goal for the day was to train, not to ski powder. We were planning to hike into and out of as many huts as possible in one day. The max would be four huts. We arrived at the salt shed parking lot at 9am. Our dog jumped out as soon as we opened our door. We quickly started up the skin track going to Rohr Ridge. We broke off into the bush until we hit the logging road. Going up the road I remembered when we had come here in the fall and climbed Mt. Marriott. That was an amazing experience and I was very happy to be back there. Hitting the real trail head we didn’t see any tracks from the past few days.

The short steep pitch seemed to be very fast. After that the long slow part took much longer than I had expected. I kept looking up ahead and thinking that the lake would be just beyond that bunch of trees. We walked for 1 hour 15 minutes gaining very little elevation. Entering the Wendy Thompson Hut at 11:30 we saw that there was no one else there. We looked around the hut and had a snack.

Since we were behind schedule we soon started the “descente”. Once we reached the steeper pitch my dad followed a set of ski tracks that lead to the skier’s right. This was steep and hard to navigate. Once the angle flattened again we side stepped for 10 minutes until we reached the logging road. This descent was fast and we arrived at our car at 1:30. This was much later than I though it would be and what we had hoped for. Nevertheless, we drove to the parking lot for Cerise Creek. Quickly we ate and then started up the next slope. I remembered this hike from last Winter when my dad and I skied on Chief Pascal. When we reached the first section of logging road I was feeling vey good. I remembered this was where we turned off last time and thought that the hut would be within 30 minutes. I had been to the hut once before. I was about 7 years old and we had gone in the summer and had slept in a tent. I was terribly wrong about the timeline.

As we started back into the trees snow began to stick onto the bottom of our skins. This happens because our skins did not have wax on them. This was extremely annoying. At the worst part we were stopping at least every 5 minutes to scrape the 15 centimetres of snow off our skins. We couldn’t scrape it off well without taking off our skis. The trail was flat and felt very long. Eventually we came to what looked like a small open valley. The wind picked up and my dad said we were either very close or half way. As we rounded the corner we saw that we were close to the hut, he explained where the cabin was. It would be another 30 minutes. It was snowing quite a bit and the wind was blowing it every which way. We reached the hut and saw many pairs of skis and some spilt boards.

Inside there was 10 people who where very excited to see our dog. We sat and ate for about 15 minutes. I took off a boot and sock to reapply some Leukoptape. We started down the skin tracked and had to wait for our dog who was taking a long time to descende. Skiing down we had to double pole and side step a bit but we were down in 50 minutes. I thought it would have taken much longer. It was 6 when we were in our car. We talked about where we would go, or if we would go again. I didn’t think that I would be able to go up for another 4 hours so we decided to go to Cayoosh. We started with a fast pace and were soon at the top pitch which is very flat. We removed our skin but kept our heels unlocked. This section was pretty fun. We double poled, walked and glided until the end of the hut. We took a picture and said hello to the skiers and boarders who were staying the night.

Going down we turned on our flash lights. This descent seemed long but was better than the other two. We arrived back at our car at 8:10. I felt tired but was so happy to have spent the day in the mountians.