Red Heather, November 21st

Daily vert: 750

Total so far: 3550

Whistler Mountain has been open all week, and after a few days of lift assisted turning it was time to try and rack up some more vert. I decided that the Diamond Head/Elfin Lakes area would be a good objective, as it's fairly mellow, easy to access and I'd heard it is fills in quickly early on in the season. We left Whistler at around 8am, and after stopping to put snow chains on about half way up the Elfin Lakes road, we parked the car about 2km from the parking lot at around 9.30. As is often the way things didn't quite work out as we had planned! There was a LOT of unconsolidated snow which must have fallen over the past few days. Ski penetration on the Elfin Lakes trail was around 30cm. Once we made it to the tree line ski penetration was closer to 45cm. Foot penetration was over a meter! Needless to say travel was painfully slow and tiring! I had to be back in Whistler for work at 6pm, so at around 1.30 we decided to call it. The original objective of skiing Columnar Peak close to Elfin Lakes hut had gone out the window not long after we left the car. The secondary objective of skiing some lines of Paul Ridge was also now abandoned. We tried to make some turns on the frontside of Round Mountain about Red Heather shelter, but it was too deep and not nearly steep enough- we could hardly get moving at all! We skied back down our up track to the hut to finish off our food and then skied down the road to the car. On the way out we met at least 15 people heading up, none of whom seemed to have any idea how how lucky they were not to be breaking trail! There was a few groups of skiers with similar plans to us (but a bit more time), several out of shape snowshoers, and even a group of snowboarders boot packing! The most important thing I learnt from this trip is not to jump on this route right after a fresh snowfall. Even thou the road hadn't been plowed, by the time we got back to the car all the other vehicles had made the road far more drivable, and all the heavy trail breaking slowed us down by close to a factor of two. I'm not going to upload the GPS track or elevation profile from this trip as it is too pathetic, but it was another 700m of vert towards my lofty target!