The End...

The last few days after my injury have been quite a shift in momentum. Instead of being focus on skiing day after day, dressing each morning with the avy beacon, putting the skins on, having fun all day long in the mountains and going to bed early... we are now mostly... drinking beer!


After a few days of Evans skiing with peoples we meet in Valdez we decided to drive back south. We left Valdez at around 6pm so that we would be driving road 37 from Whitehorse to Prince George during the day, when gas stations are open from 7am to 8pm. Only 36 hours later we were in Whistler, well rested thanks to the bed we setup in the back of the car...


We then spent a few days with friends in Vancouver and it is now the end of the trip. We are now going back to our regular occupations and that means no more:

• Analysis of the weather forecast, avy bulletin and snowfall history everywhere in North America...
• Living for skiing... skiing with good friends!
• Feeling naked without kneepad and avy beacon...
• Being naked on top of Lilly's Col! :-)
• Skiing Alta while the access road is closed and there is only 50 cars in the parking lot...
• Having a schedule of 8h of skiing per day, 8h of driving and 8h of sleeping...
• Discovering new and remote skiing paradises...
• Chilling out and drying stuff in ski lodge... putting back cold boots every morning!
• Never knowing what we will doing the next day...
• Alaska... Utah... BC...

And a few quick facts about the trip:

• Droved 26000 km to chase snow in Utah, BC and Alaska...
• 79 days of travel :
• 66 days of skiing of which we considered that only 4 were shitty!
• 19 where in a resort.
• 46 in the backcountry.
• 1 heli-drop.
• 6 days lost due to long distance driving (Quebec to BC, Valdez to BC, etc)...
• 5 days off to rest...
• 75 night sleeping in our car/tent/doghouse/outside and 4 of couchsurfing...
• Climbed about 140000 vertical feet...
• Eat about 52 pounds of spaghetti...

The trip was cut two weeks short... but it still was a great winter! We chased some good powder, we discovered steep runs and we dropped great pillow lines...

See you all next winter and thanks for reading us!

Alexis

Alaska, Thompson Pass and Valdez...

As a skier, you certainly heard that word a lot. Every movie, every magazine as footage of it. They always make it looks as the steepest, gnarliest and more challenging terrain. So how is really Alaska?!


Pretty much everything you hear is true. It is steep, gnarly and for sure quite challenging! We got here couple days ago and were planning to ski Thompson Pass. After driving 12 hours from Whitehorse, we got here around 4am.

First thing we realized: damm it's impressive!! Sharp ridges, steep couloirs and big open faces are all over the place! Thompson pass is all in alpine terrain so we were quite happy to have some good visibility to check it out. By what we saw and from what we've been told, the snowpack was quite stable.


Using the book "Alaska Backcountry Skiing: Valdez & Thompson Pass" we were able to hit the backcountry without any problem. It's really a must to whoever wants to spend some time touring around Valdez. We had some good day skiing some nice and steep stuff but we had something else in mind...


Since there was a high pressure over Valdez, we decided to try to get on a chopper to have a single drop off a peak with a guide and from there hike around for a day. After a little bit of shopping, we made a deal with Valdez Heli-ski Guide for a drop. The only problem was that they were expecting some very high wind.


Well, the wind didn't show up!!! Instead, we had a bluebird day with moderate wind and mild temperature. So here we are all setup and minded for our first ride in a chopper ever!

Skiing in Alaska is pretty cool, but being drop by a chopper to ski in AK is even better!

Going up, the guide showed us the peak where we were landing. The Cherry couloir drop from Python peak with an entrance at 45+ degree and the rest of it around 40+.


The snow was not that great and going down was really challenging since if you start sliding down, you can end up hurting yourself quite badly. After that warm up run, we climb another couloir just next to Cherry couloir. The bootpack allowed us to ski 2 different couloir. It's a pretty good thing because opening the bootpack was quite exhausting.



The snow was again hard to ski switching from soft to crust to ice. Babiche ski first and hit a icy spot, went to the backseat... and ear a pop followed by knee pain. Yep, the knee is busted. He has been able to ski the rest of the couloir to a safe flat spot, where he rested while I hiked up for one run. The bad thing is that the snow on the other couloir was very nice and the turns came easily. After that run, he said that he would not be skiing for the rest of the day. So here we are with 2 choices: either all skiing out or having him being pick up by the chopper while I keep skiing. The decision was made quickly and after waiting for the chopper, I kept skiing.


The other couloirs were really nice and easy to ski with good snow, easy sluff and nice steep run. The day ended after 4500ft of bootpack, 6 runs and a total vertical (with the heli drop) of more than 8000ft vertical. Don't have to tell you than I was very please with that day! I HIGHLY recommand skiing that kind of day once in your lifetime!!! The thrill is almost incredible to describe and being out there enjoying the snow in those mountain is just the best thing ever.


Back to Babiche knee. Probably the LCL is sprain from what he was told at the medical clinic.
Meaning: season/trip is over... Since we had plan for 2 more weeks of skiing, it also means the end of my trip too...

I've been skiing for the last 2 days by myself or hooking up with other skiers, but it is really not the same. So the plan is now one more day of skiing before heading down toward Whistler where I can ski 3 more days with JS while Babiche will be driving back to school in California!

One thing is sure: we'll be back in AK because we are really not done skiing around those mountains!!!

Short term forecast... 3500 km toward Vancouver!
Extended forecast... 5050 km toward California!

Evans

White Pass... Yukon Skiing!

As any with most good plan that we came up with, we didn't follow the plan of stopping at Cassiar Mountain where there is suppose to have good skiing. The mountain barely had snow on them, so we kept driving north. We reached Whitehorse in the afternoon, spending some time in the library looking for something to ski around... driving more would mean losing another day of skiing on the road!


According to a search on telemarktips.com most of the good skiing in Yukon is concentrated around White Pass (just by the Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site). There is a pyramid shaped peak just West of the pass called Feather Peak.


Reaching the summit is just a matter of a quick skin up (about 1100m from car to summit) that ends up by bootpacking. The snow was wind affected so the bootpack wasn't a big deal (red = hike up, green = ski)!


We skied down the top east side of the peak before cutting toward the backside which still had some good snow on it!


We spent our second day at White Pass on Log Cabin Mountain... a short skiing (about 850m) day before leaving for Valdez! On our way up we found a lot of icy spots, but fortunately we found some terrain features that were holding about 10cm of snow all the way to the bottom...


Summing it all, White Pass has some weirdly shaped mountains, mostly alpine terrain and is located in a windy corridor. But for whom is willing to search a little bit, good snow can stays trapped in terrain features for quite some time. We even saw some interesting couloirs on our way out...

Now leaving Yukon for Alaska, stay tuned!! :-)

Alexis

Hell Bell II - Nigunsaw Pass

The north of British Columbia really rocks!
Following the advices of some local we met on our journey, we made a stop around Bell II. But where's Bell II???


Bell II is on the highway 37 that goes to Yukon. What we found there is just some incredible terrain for backcountry. It looks pretty similar to Roger's Pass but without any information center, detailed maps that show you where to ski or daylodge. There is a heliski operation there, where you can have a look at the map of the area, get a crap or fill up at 1.28$/liter. We found some information through the avalanche safety crew that control the avalanche around Nigunsaw Pass.


Following there advices, we headed up to Red Flat creek to get a first view of the area. The snow was good considering the warm weather. So good that we went back there for another tour the following day. With perfect weather and just a little breeze, we climbed the 1200m all the way to the summit. The view from there was just spectacular the terrain surrounding is really full of opportunities for a skier. There is pretty much no one that use this backcountry skiing site for touring. We could have spend a month there skiing different runs every single day. But we have such a tight schedule considering everything we want to ski that we had to leave...


After a great day of skiing, we headed up towards Stewart. I've heard a lot about Stewart. Seen it in magazine and film. From what we've been able to see, there's not much to ski around Stewart if you don't have a chopper... We tried to get some motivation to go skiing a ridge near Mezidian lake, but the lake was not really frozen and the snow looked terrible. Total ascent: 16m...

That was the fourth day of the whole trip that didn't really worth putting the ski boots on! Jumping in the car after some vodka (to forget that shitty day), we headed toward Terrace!


Shames is an other typical northern resort. A small and friendly place that get hammered by more than 40feet of snow annually. The resort got a little bit of good terrain, but this is not the main reason to make it there. The slackcountry (backcountry from the resort - check out http://www.azadadventures.com/bc/home.html) is just enormous. We had the chance to hook up with one of the avalanche control guy we met in Bell II who kindly guided us around. The north aspect is pretty much the only thing left since the warming trend doesn't really want to stop!

We plan on hitting the backcountry of Shames one more time, drop Amelie (who is going back to reality) and head toward Alaska (which is only 2300km from Terrace). We might stop around the Cassiar mountain (near the Yukon border) where we've been told there was some good skiing!

Keep on going north!!

evans

Thanks Ullr for blessing us with snow!

We got in Powder King at 1am and we were a little bit disappointed to see a clear sky again… the same one that hit us for the last week! So we setup the tent without the fly to keep humidity out of the tent. But we got the weather almost right… at around 4am it started snowing and the tent became all slushy. We woke up in the morning, hiked the resort (closed on Monday to Wednesday) and got a few laps!

On that evening we went for a tour of the area around the resort! Although there is no real village some people live there… a few of them in real house, but most of them in buses or RV renovated for the winter (or with funny stickers)! What a special place!

Looking for more entertainment I ditched my car driving around at night! We had to shovel 40 cm deep, using all possible tricks during one hour and a half to take it out...

We woke up the following day not that motivated, until we met Leo and his sled!! Leo is a retired fisherman now living in Powder King, skiing a few hundreds days per year and going faster than anyone! Things happened pretty fast, so we didn’t understand everything that was going on, but we ended up driving the sled, skied good snow and were happy to discover the place!

Leo kindly offered us his place for the night and some fresh cooked bread, eggs and bacon the next morning! He’s really the King of Powder King!! We offered him some maple syrup…

The resort opened on Thursday and we were there for the first chair! It was funny to see our skintrack on the way up! We skied some good snow all day long… there was only about 50 persons at the resort, nothing was really getting tracked!

After that big day we went to the bar for a few pitchers of beer. Most of the staff was there (maybe even ALL of the staff… thus about 11 persons) and we had fun spending the evening with them! Powder King is a small and friendly place… after two days there you talked to everyone, they offer you a place to stay and they are all happy give you some information about their little place of heaven!

It was snowing, so we stayed one more day…

Here is what we discovered about Powder King in a few words: a small resort full of simple and funny people who enjoy skiing! The hill isn’t that big or steep, but there is decent backcountry to do there (the backside on Camel Humps, the slackcountry on Ester and Hip runs or the steeper Murray Ridge in front of the highway) and it is one of these places where they seem to receive light snow everyday!

We left Powder King for Smithers and skied there for two days. The snow was lighter and the terrain steeper than what we found in PK but the hill was really wind blown. Many people here showed us the area… there is something up North that make everyone friendly!

If you show up at Smithers and want some information about were to go backcountry. Go straight to the Valhalla Pure on Main Street and talk to Brian. He actually got all the information about what is going on around Smithers!!!

We had a fun time in Smithers, but the local told us that the backcountry is limited since they are not keeping the logging road open anymore and that we should head up to Stewart or Terrace…

So we are on the road again…

Alexis