Total so far: 1100
It has begun! After months of preparation (well not really) today I finally managed to get some skiing orientated elevation gain under my belt. A week of solid rain in Whistler ended with a sudden cold snap, and rumour had it that the Duffy had received in excess of 20cm. The Anniversary Glacier in Cerise Creek seemed like a good spot for and early season mission, so at 6.30am on Thursday November 8th I picked Benoit up from his house in Brio and off we went.
There was a thin coating of snow on the summer trail right from the highway, but we stayed in our hiking shoes and made it to Keith's hut in around 2h15m.
The plan was to ski one or two laps on the glacier it's self, and after a short rest break at the cabin we headed up onto the shoulder towards Motel 66. At around 2000m elevation, where we planned to ski onto the glacier, we noticed that the more north westerly aspects, heading back into the creek below Central Couloir etc looked to be well filled in, so we skied a short lap down there. The fresh snow was quite deep and extremely light for these parts, but there was barely any base to speak off.
We then rejoined our skin track and headed back onto the glacier as originally planned. This was slightly more disappointing- The fresh snow was not quite as deep on this side, and the glacier was covered in huge chunks of old and frozen avalanche debris. However we still managed to get a few enjoyable turns.
A slight error of judgement at this point found us trying to traverse back to the hut directly, which resulted in us cutting out a large portion of the glacier in order to slowly pick our way over barely covered moraines and bushes. The better option would have been to ski the glacier all the way to the little lake at the bottom, and then boot pack back over the moraines to the cabin as you would do in summer. Oh well. We'll know for next time.
After another brief rest at the cabin we began the long slog back to the car. We kept our boots on this time and (unsuccessfully) experimented with skiing every so often, but it ended up being better to walk.
The last 20 minutes saw us plodding along the last stretch of trail in the pitch dark, but about 2h30m after leaving the cabin we were safely back at the car, with 1090m of elevation gain down, 98,910m to go!
Route map for Nov 8th trip. This was my first time using my Suunto Ambit GPS watch on a trip and I'm still getting the hang of it. I think I had it set to only take a GPS co-ordinate every 60 seconds instead of every 1 second, which results in a few funny shapes and lines on the track.
Elevation profile.
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