Homathko Part 4 – Leaving the Icefield

Homathko Part 4 – Leaving the Icefield

Given the sustained bad weather we’d been sitting through, we were surprised when the forecast came true and blue skies appeared. It took a long time to dig everything out of the snow, but eventually we were packed and bid farewell to the igloo. The 2-3′ high ridges of snow that had built up between the tents were impressive and showed a fair amount of snow had been moved around during the storm.

We were starting from Sasquatch Pass, where we had left our food cache on the flight in, and figured three days to be a reasonably generous amount of time to get to the Franklin Arm of Chilko Lake, where Roland Class was going to pick us up with his boat.
Immediately after cresting the pass our first obstacle was the Alph Glacier, which passed surprisingly easily despite a steep serac band. Ahead lay the final hanging valley, guarded by very steep slopes. We stopped early in the day so that we could tackle these slopes in the cold of the morning when avalanche risk is much lower.

The second morning we climbed into the hanging valley that would give access to our exit route, swapping skis for crampons on the steep and hard snow. By late morning we found ourselves looking along the long ridge leading to Snowsquall Pass. Our plan was to reach the pass and drop onto the Stilly Glacier by the evening, but below us a series of ramps beckoned invitingly.

We made the decision to get onto the ramps an into the final valley floor as quickly as possible before the sun made the slopes too soft. What followed started as a worrying crossing of big, steep and heavily loaded slopes  but ended as the only good downhill skiing of the trip; good soft spring ego snow allowing long lazy turns despite the steepness of the slope. We then had some fantastic easy angled tree skiing into the head of Nine Mile Creek and, we thought, the trip was pretty much done. Turns out those final nine miles would be the longest of the trip! More in Part Five…

Homathko Part 3

Homathko Part 3

We had an auspicious start, with two solid days of good weather that saw us well established on the icefield. However, it quickly became unsettled again, a common feature of the weather in the Coast Mountains! We were often able to make distance across the icefield, but it was always too poor for downhill skiing.

Occasionally storms would pass through and we’d be woken by the tent flapping and vibrating in the gale. We built high walls from snow blocks to prevent damage to our thin nylon and aluminium shelters, and once we were safe we opened the whisky and lit our pipes, broke out the books and the iPods and enjoyed some downtime. Roger built an igloo as the latrine kept filling in with snow, but before we ruined it we had a Scotch and Christmas cake party inside, happy to be both a) out of the wind and snow and b) standing up!

Eventually time grew short enough that we had to think of leaving we had a boat to catch and so we used our Yellowbrick beacon to request a forecast. Fortunately a break in the weather was expected so we holed up, kept digging the tents out and waited for the sun…