Shudder Glacier

Daily Vert: 2200m

Total Vert so far: 57,250m

The original plan today had been to go and have a crack at the Aussie Couloir on Joffre, but with 20cm of fresh wet snow over the weekend and sky rocketing temperatures that idea seemed a little too at risk from wet slides.  The back up plan was doing the Curtain Glacier variation of a one day Spearhead, so we headed up the lifts early and waited for the T-bars to open.  We got off to a good start, but having to break trail through 20cm of new snow was certainly slowing us down compared to last week.  

As we were heading up over Pattison there was a lot of whuphing and settling in the snowpack, which made us a little nervous, and we took the longer route around Pattison in order to avoid the steeper section on its north west shoulder, and continued to feel a few settlements as we crossed the Tremor Glacier.  The questionable stability and increasing cloud made me choose to abandon the Curtain Glacier and ski the slightly more mellow Shudder Glacier instead, which John Baldwin describes in his book as 'a superb mountaineering adventure'.  We'd been sharing the skin track with a nice couple who going to attempt to ski Hour Glass on Tremor, and then rap back around and carry on to the Curtain.  As we began our descent down Shudder the clouds seemed to be thickening quite quickly, so if you guys are reading this I'd be eager to hear how you got on.

Anyway, onto the pictures.

Runar drops down the Shudder Glacier

We laid our tracks close together to mitigate crevasse danger.

About half way down

Some cool ice features

Big turns in big terrain

Runar in his element

Close to the bottom.  You can see our tracks and also the tracks by 2 groups from Whsitler heli.

Goofy grin stoke

Looking back up at 1000m of Glacier

Once at the bottom we knew we had a fairly long skin to get back to Phalanx, but we were hoping to do it in about two and a half hours.  This turned out to be a wild underestimate.  Several hours of flat skinning past Billy Goat Lake eventually gave way to several hours to very steep skinning in order to gain the Phalanx bench at around 1750m.

The best way we could find to cross Wedge Creek.  Notice Runars ski hanging on a branch where it got stuck after he threw it across....

This is the view from near the bottom of the Spearhead/Phalanx confluence, and from here we could have traversed around to the poop chutes with very elevation gain.  I knew from previous experience thou that this would involve at least an hour and a half of annoying flat skinning, and would also involve skiing down the poop chutes, which is famously rancid at this time of year. We elected instead to skin the whole way back up the Spearhead and then ski down Corona bowl, which I estimated would take a similar amount of time, as it was less distance but more elevation, and I was confident that Corona bowl would be a better ski than the Poop Chutes.  It probably was better, and consultation of the map when I got home confirmed that horizontally we travelled less distance, but the additional elevation gain was significant, as was our fatigue, and from when this photo was taken it actually took two and a half hours to get to Corona.

 The last push up the Spearhead

Finally made it to Corona bowl.  6 hours after finishing the ski down Shudder.

All in all this is not a route that I would recommend to anyone else, and it takes it's place on a short list of tours that I am very confident I will never bother to attempt again.  The ski down the Glacier was nice enough- easily comparable to Cayoosh in length and steepness, but unlike Cayoosh, the Shudder Glacier does not drop you 20 minutes from your car.  Ski Cayoosh, or ski other Glaciers in the Spearhead range, but the Shudder Glacier is best left to Whistler Heli!