Snow Chasers: Welcome to the 8th season of Snowchasing!

Unfortunately for you (and especially for me!!), this won’t be a full season of skiing. Seems like the real life is finally catching up a bit on me since I haven’t been able to pull off 3 months straight as the previous years. My skiing season will consist of way more skiing around my hometurf on the East Coast, 3 weeks roadtripping around British Columbia, 3 weeks travel in Georgia and a month in Chile next summer.

After quite a bad early season in Quebec, the conditions finally turned much better around the Holidays.

Nevertheless, I left the day after what as already been qualified as the storm of the century who dropped 45cm on Montreal.

My flight was delayed by about 3 hours and I finally got to Vancouver around 1h00AM to be picked up by my friend JS. Thanks to my brother, I got a nice upgrade from the economic class to the business class! Étienne, the third fellow for the first week who flew earlier, was already sleeping when I landed.

We got an early start and left Vancouver towards the Duffey Lake area around 6h00AM. Don’t have to tell you that I slept much of the way!

We figured it would be a great idea to start with something nice and simple so we headed to Rohr Ridge. As we pack our stuff, the clouds started to scattered.

We had a bit of everything during the way up : sunshine, heavy snow shower, clouds. As we gained elevation, the view was simply stunning. Actually, it was probably some of the nicest view I have ever seen. With the clouds breaking beneath us and the light bouncing at different intensity on them, it was a scenery simply breathtaking.

We eventually got to the top of one of the chute that is facing due south.

The snow was really nice at the top, but eventually got heavy. Instead of keep skiing down, we put the skins back on and climb back to the top to ski a face that was more North facing.

We skied in the trees and the snow was really nice and soft.

The view on its side, was just spectacular!

We eventually reach the parking lot after a great start on this 3 weeks roadtip in British Columbia.

We drove down to the Joffre Creek parking lot to spend the night. As the sun drop behind the mountains, the temperature followed and also dropped! Since I was a bit jetlagged, I went to bed quite early.

We guessed that it was probably somewhere between -20Celcius and -30Celcius during the night.

We woked up not so late but we were getting slowed down by the cold temperature. We eventually started the car around 9h00 who reminds us that it was still -16Celcius.

We drove towards Steep Creek on the East side of the Duffey Lake. The hike-in is not the most pleasant. It’s a 5km slug-in that climbs 550m. The unfortunate part is that there isn’t any good skiing for this section. We got pass by some ski-sledders who had some great set-up. They were all parked at the foothills of the good skiing. To get a tow-in is certainly a great option since you save all this somewhat useless effort.

We headed to Peak 2318 that didn’t looked much tracked. We follow a skintrack that was a bit shitty since it was switchbacking all the time, but when we eventually reached the opening, the trees opened up and we were able to climb much faster.

When we finally reach the highest skiable point of the ridge, we debated for some time to figure if we were better off dropping on the north side of the west side. We’ll never know what the West side was, but the north side had some great snow! It wasn’t especially deep (8-10in), but it was nice and steady!