StringOnAStick
We recently returned from a trip to a backcountry ski lodge in the Monashee Mountains of interior B.C., Canada. There are a lot of these lodges now, where you fly in via helicopter and spend your days with licensed ski guides doing what I explain as “hike up and ski down” skiing, not heliskiing, a significantly more expensive sport plus my husband and I like the hiking up part. There are plenty of heliskiing and snowcat skiing lodges too if you aren’t into the climbing uphill thing and have a lot more cash to spare. After 4 days to a week or however long a holiday you booked, the helicopter comes back and returns you to where you left your car, while a new group of eager skiers rotates into the lodge for their turn.
We used to do one of these trips every winter, but 8 years ago there started a long hiatus due to illnesses and losses in my husband’s family. We were invited to join some folks we had met over 18 years ago on one of these trips, so we agreed. These are popular enough now and with pent up demand from Covid and the favorable (to US citizens at least) exchange rate that you have to book a year in advance now. We enjoyed our trip but we also realized that now that we are retired, we don’t need to (and shouldn’t for many reasons, one of which is the helicopter aspect) spend this kind of time or money, and when we retired we moved to a town in central Oregon that lets us take advantage of excellent backcountry skiing when conditions are good, so there is little need to “vacate” from the life we’ve built here. Still, it was nice to do one last ski lodge trip to B.C.
This trip started with a very heavy snowfall on a very thin, drought conditions snowpack so it was tricky skiing given the hidden rocks and tree tops. The first few days were very snowy or foggy, also tricky conditions due to poor visibility but we did get some sunshine and settled snow by the last few days.
On The Road – StringOnAStick – Backcountry skiing, Monashee Mts, B.C.Post + Comments (32)
I included this one just for informational purposes. This shows my husband taking his climbing skins off his skis as the last light of day fades away. Climbing skins are like “directional velcro” sheets that have a reusable glue and attachment hardware that you stick to the bottom of your alpine touring skis; they allow you to easily walk uphill on snow. When you reach the top of your chosen downhill run, you take off the skins, stash them in your pack, lock your heels down in your multipurpose specialized ski bindings and now you have the same thing as a typical downhill skiing set up, but the skis are specially designed to be much, much lighter because you do have to drag them uphill for every downhill run. Most alpine touring ski setups include specialized light but strong ski boots that have special fittings that are part of the alpine touring ski binding so you can have as light a ski/boot combo as possible while sacrificing as little performance as possible. The gear has gotten so good that I’d say very little is being left on the table as far as performance goes now.
Some days you left the lodge and climbed upwards to start the day, and other days you first went downhill and then put climbing skins on to get to the top of the next run but on the other side of the valley. The goal is always to find fresh powder snow to ski. Most days involved 3 to 6 miles of travel and usually around 3,000′ of climbing during the day though one big day was closer to 4,000′ on this trip.