On the second day of 2019 I set out on my first day ski touring of the year. My dad and I left our house at 9am and drove down the road for less than five minutes. Arriving at the Spetch Creek Forestry Road it was really neat to be going to a place so close to home. We hopped on our old snowmobile and set off up the road. Having to check the map in the beginning after a wrong fork we soon found ourselves in front of a fallen tree. It was a small tree and my dad cut it out of the way within minutes.
From thereon we had fresh tracks. Coming to the final fork in the road at around 6 km we unloaded the gear from the sled. I started to put skins on our skis as my dad road up both paths a little further to make the going on skis easier. It turned out that the cross ditches on the upper one were too severe to sled very far. Starting up I got hot quickly and de-layered within the first five minutes. We were walking under a small cut block to the end of the logging road. From there we started into the forest and up the summer trail leading to Valentine Lake. At the start it was fairly flat so the travel was easy, but as the grade increased it became very hard.
The snow was a mess of freeze-thaw crust and tree bombs. We ended up carrying our skis for twenty minutes after I had repeatedly slipped trying to ascend the slippery slope.
Once the angle became lesser we were relieved to put our skis back on and the snow soon deepened and was softer, though it had a slight crust. It had started to snow and it continued the entire day. Eventually it stuck to my hair and matted it. Coming to a valley we headed slightly to the right, but at the end of it we crossed over to the left side. The snow had become deeper and the crust had almost disappeared, I was getting excited to ski down. We were heading for the ski run Wonderland that my dad has done many times heli skiing. As we rose higher up we came to the bottom of a run out zone and the wind picked up. The wind chill made us very cold and we put more layers on. Looking up it seemed there was still a long ways, but we ascended at a good pace. It was 3pm, and 4pm had been ETA so we sent out a satellite message saying we would be late and discussed what to do. My dad thought that we should descend the same way, because we were already late and the final 300 metres looked like tricky traversing. I expressed sadness so he said we could keep going for 15 minutes and see how fast we were going. The going was harder as we made our way around rocks through pockets of snow and heard whumph and saw cracks. This worried me but my dad later told me that if anything slid it would have been harmless as it was so thin. Almost exactly 15 minutes later we came to a notch on the ridge. It was then super windy and gusty. The entrance to Wonderland was at least 100 metres further up the ridge, and would take us too long. In the wind we quickly took our skins off and turned back towards where we had come.
Starting down I didn’t have my goggles on because the light was so flat, but the wind was whipping snow into my eyes. The skiing was good at times and very wind blown at others, due to wind loading. When we came to the spot where we had stopped and sent a message and I put goggles on. It was then more sheltered so the snow was much better, but still had a slight crust.
We were in the trees shortly thereafter and the snow improved, but the terrain didn’t. Having to shuffle across the valley we came to the creek and followed it down for quite a while. As the snow coverage decreased we searched for somewhere to exit. We took off our skis and traversed through the forest. Since the ascent had been difficult at the start, we were hoping to hit the top of the cut block and ski down it. When we put our skis back on we also took our headlamps out. Skidding down we were heading to the skiers left and we crossed a tiny creek. I was moving slower and slower and we were getting wetter and wetter. Shortly after my dad asked if I wanted a break (which I declined) we came to the top of the clearing.
Starting down this I was surprised by how good it was, I thought it was the best skiing of the day. There were some pillows, but we had to go slow since it was dark. That was definitely the most fun part of the day.
Landing back on the logging road we made our way back to the sled and then road out arriving to the truck at 6pm. The conditions had been mixed, we hadn’t skied our objective and we were soaked, but training is training and the harder it is the better it will make you for next time.