Home > Trip Reports > February 18-21, 2005, Rogers Pass, BC

February 18-21, 2005, Rogers Pass, BC

2/18/05
Canada BC
3177
5
Posted by Pete_Alderson on 2/21/05 8:47pm
Clear weather, good north facing week-old powder, and a suprising amount of untracked terrain yet to be skied made for a great long weekend up at Rogers.

friday-  Youngs Peak via the Asulkan (steps of paradise).  Top 500' soft but heavily wind effected, the rest was nice and dusty.  The best lines were to drop down skiers right of the hut to the valley bottom, far fewer tracks that direction instead of fall-line runs to the Asulkan Hut.  We started from the parking lot at about 8, topped out around 2 and were at the car by 5, were not moving all that fast and hung out at the hut for about an hour for lunch...easily done in a day as long as you start early, or just move faster than us.

saturday-  Pearly Rock.  The upper bowls were fantastic and a hell of an up close view of Mt.Sir Donald.  There was plenty of room for everyone to get untracked lines, some of us skinned back up the top 800' for another lap.  Ran in to Gregg C, Silas, Mark, and others...small world.  The lower half of the Pearly Rock run was 'entertaining'...tight scrubby trees and powder pillows over boulders made for lots of turn-jump-hip check kind of skiing.  Sun crust was significant on anything steepish west facing, but as long as you kept to the north facing stuff, the snow was soft all the way to the valley floor.

sunday - Lilly glacier.  Clear and ridiculously cold.  A consistent breeze down the Lilly glacier made it feel like it was in the single digits if not colder. Once below the Dome, we got out of the wind and the sun popped out from around Mt. Swanzy to warm us up a bit. There were a few small seracs sticking up through the snowpack on the lower Lilly glacier, we carried a rope, but didn't feel the need to tie-in on the way up.  The top 8-12" of fluff was the lightest I've ever seen...looked like down, or soap flakes, the stuff didn't weigh anything...the upper Lilly did have patches of wind crust that would occationally throw ya out of your groove. The descent was great, but my legs were starting to feel the previous days tours and the breaks between tele turns became more frequent.

monday- Cheops 2.  A great half-day option when you want some turns but need to be on the road by noon.  East facing, so the snow was still good.  A few spots of tight christmas trees but most of the descent is through old slide paths with plenty of room to turn, lots of boulders and stumps to hop/fall off too.
here's a picture of pete tele-ing in fine form on youngs peak/steps of paradise

By the time we came down from Terminal Peak you guys had headed down.  Looks like you got nice turns on the small triangular face below Perly Rock.  We found the right side of Perly Rock untracked and quite good.

Gregg, how was your Three Pass tour? It looked like as nice a day as you could ask for. When we returned to the parking lot, Nathaniel's Suburu was totally trapped by Parks Canada trucks.  We tried to persuade them to cut you loose, but they seemed to have accumulated a very personal grudge against him. Hope that worked out.

Pete, Ema and Stebbi: Obviously I underestimated the logistical impediments to joining you from our downmarket lodging in Revelstoke.  See you soon, someplace closer to home.

enjoy,

Mark

I always forget how close Rogers Pass is.  I left town mid-afternoon Friday, arriving 5 1/2 hours later at the Frontier Motel, a garishly lit, faux-Western place in Revelstoke, surrounded by snowmobile trailers and huge pickup trucks.  Silas and Rob pulled in long after I went to bed, having wrestled with traffic (and apparently lost) in Seattle, Everett and Bellingham.  

They took my suggestion of a 7:30 start as a joke--a joke, can you imagine?--and dawdled a bit the following morning.  And then dawdled a bit more, and a bit more again.  I am not known for my early starts, I admit, but still...  Finally, we set off for Perley Rock, a big outcropping 4000 vertical feet from the car between Mt. Sir Donald and the Illecillewaet Nevé.  Just below our turnaround we came across a cluster of skiers preparing to descend; these turned out to be Ema, Stefan and Pete, fresh from their ascent the previous day of Young's Peak and apparently still sufficiently energetic to yo-yo once in the day's best snow on the open slopes above treeline.  Meanwhile, Gregg C (and fellow Bellinghamsters Nicki and Nathaniel) explored the vast windslab and trap-crusted slopes extending a thousand feet above.

We satisfied ourselves with a single run to the valley on a mix of nice powder, bits of windbuff, and unpredictable sections of windswept raincrust.  Above the waterfall, we opted for skiers right through the trees, where I fell somewhat behind Silas and Rob (this is an understatement: actually, I fell so far behind that they might easily have joined Pete and Ema for another run in my absence). On the shallow-pitched terrain at the head of the valley I again fell repeatedly behind, and along the luge track through the trees I completely lost all semblance of composure: skiing stiffly and without confidence, engaging in intimate acts with innocent saplings, and in general behaving as if never before on skis. Properly chastened, I returned to the Frontier Motel for a glorious and hard-earned afternoon nap.

The following day we bailed somewhat ungraciously from plans to ski with Pete, Ema & Co. in order to join an un-named TAY poster at a secret treeline powder stash far up a obscure logging road in an un-named mountain range in an undisclosed country somewhere north of the Tropic of Cancer (the alert reader will have gathered that I was sworn to secrecy under threat of serious bodily harm).  There, we skied perfect powder between 4500 and 6600 feet: bowls, glades and trees, lightly tracked or untouched, marred only by the sun effect on southern and western aspects: truly heroic stuff, 16 inches deep in a perfectly stable, graduated density.  There was discussion about slope angles, with one of our party claiming nothing greater than 30 degrees steepness, but I measured several slopes well in excess of 40, with only minor sluffing in the most extreme instances.  In such conditions it was difficult to ski other than gracefully, although I did suffer one major crash, occasioned by an unfortunate encounter with a jagged 5 inch thick stump disguised as a harmless little snow pillow (15 minutes of grunting and cussing by two of us sufficed to extricate me without injuring more than my pride).  Back in Revelstoke, I made a certain number of empty promises involving beers and social calls, napped deeply, and barely awoke for long enough to eat dinner.  

On our third and final day we again intended to join Pete and Ema, this time for a half-day ski in the Connaught drainage....but again failed to wake up sufficiently early.  Does anyone sense a pattern here?  Following our leisurely start, we skinned up to Balu Pass, one of the more popular destinations within a couple of hours of the Best Western Motel.  There, literally hundreds of tracks covered slopes of every conceivable description...and a few not so easily conceived, like the half-dozen tracks descending the 50+ degree face of the peaklet just north of the pass. We skied a series of yo-yo's on rather more moderate, north-easterly terrain in remarkably good snow which suffered only by comparison to that of the previous day.  

Following a rather unseemly incident (I will refrain from soiling the electronic pages of TAY, beyond mentioning that it involved Silas, an empty gas tank, and a moonlighting "masseusse" in a decidedly low-rent district of Revelstoke), I finally headed home mid-afternoon on Monday.  The highways were largely empty, the driving effortless, the border guard more interested in certain exotic stamps in my passport than inspection of the disorderly jumble in the back of my van.

Throughout the weekend, the snowpack was remarkable for its skiing quality as well for its stability.  Apparently, rain to mountaintop elevation had caused a major slide cycle several weeks ago, then bonded all previous weak layers into a single, frozen mass before being buried by fresh snow under gradually-cooling conditions.  This left a snowpack which refused to release no matter how we battered and tortured it.  With the exception of some minor sluffing on very steep terrain plus a single old fracture line noted near Balu Pass, we saw no signs of any instability even on the steepest slopes.  South and west aspects are, as might be expected, severely sun-affected, and above treeline there is a lot of variable windbuff, but north and east aspects remain generally good to excellent conditions, even a week after the last snowfall. There is so much terrain in the area that even relatively vast hordes of skiers are swallowed by the landscape, and untouched lines remain the rule, not the exception, along the trade routes in popular guidebooks.  

Enjoy,

Mark

Hahaha, that TR caused some serious grins. Glorious napping indeed. I think my most glorious nap was below Young's Peak, after I plunged over the handlebars so suddenly that I had no idea what was going on until I realized my head was buried in powder up (not down) to my navel. After extricating and skimming the slope to make sure nobody was looking I promptly took a nap on my pack right there in the sun-soaked crater. What fun  ;D

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february-18-21-2005-rogers-pass-bc
Pete_Alderson
2005-02-22 04:47:43