Forums Trip Reports Trifecta in the duffey…finally Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total) Author Posts April 13, 2011 at 5:55 pm #574714 wilkez 176 Posts Ok so I shouldn’t complain about the ridiculous amount of snow that we have been getting on the BC south coast this season, but we have had hardly any sun to go get on the big tours this year. So we are late in the season with a big fat stable snowpack now, and the sun finally showed up (for 2 days…) after a couple of good storms. The result was the perfect trifecta of sun, snow, and stability, so I headed out with a good crew to Cerise Creek in the Duffey to tick a few missions off the list. Day 1: We headed left the car at 9am with overnight gear up to Keith’s Hut with the sun just starting to poke out. We arrived at the hut (which is almost completely buried because of the huge snowpack), dropped off our gear, and headed for Mt. Matier – the highest peak in the joffre group at just under 2800m. Tunnelling down into Kieth’s Hut: The clouds broke just as we came up to anniversary col and began the bootpack up mt. Matier. Perfect timing…here’s the bootpack up Matier from anniversary col with Joffre in the background: The actual summit of matier is a rimy shitshow at this time of year, so the ski down off the summit was interesting… From the bottom of that short pitch is a little col and an easy entrance into the NW face of matier, which was loaded up with unreal snow. However, there is a very aesthetically pleasing sub-peak of matier just beyond the col with a little more exciting entrance to the NW face. Louie and I decided it had to be done, while Lee volunteered to stay at the col and take pictures. Thanks Lee! Louie making some fun turns (more in the video!): Beautiful tracks made by Louie and I: Let me tell you…riding that line was one of the best feelings I have ever had. I bombed the 500m or so down to the glacier faster than I have ever gone on a snowboard in my life. I think I made 3 turns down the first face and outran my sluff down the rest for the first time ever – I never realized how fast guys in movies are going until you actually do it for youreslf. Check out the video at the bottom for some video action on Matier NW face… Next we decided to climb back up Matier and ski a line rarely skied (for pretty obvious reasons). The goal was to ski off Matier peak into the twin one glacier. The only reason this was possible is because of the epic snowpack this year in the Duffey, because the Twin One Glacier is one ugly glacier. Here’s a picture of the Twin One Glacier early in the season, to show why it was a little scary and unbelievable we could actually ski it: Well, it was a great idea to ski it. The snow was deeper than you could ever ask for. Lee getting some of it: Me playing in the pow, while dodging crevasses, bergshrunds, ice falls and seracs: Louie and I happy to be alive, looking back at our line off the summit: Back to the hut after that for some food and some sleep after a 11.5hr day of touring, so we could be ready to rock again for day 2! Video of the whole trip: [vimeo:107kx2rr]http://www.vimeo.com/22306909[/vimeo:107kx2rr] April 13, 2011 at 6:27 pm #639260 wilkez 176 Posts Day 2: Day 2 started nice and early to get out in the great weather that was looking even better than day 1. The goal for day 2 was to tour over to Mt. Duke and then to Vantage peak on the way back towards the hut. Both mountains have nice big north faces which we anticipated would provide the goods. The morning started off passing by the twin 1 glacier which we skied the afternoon before, so we spent a bunch of time admiring our tracks as we skied to vantage-duke col to begin the climb towards mt. duke. I had an interesting icy traverse experience going across an ugly S facing slope which was covered in slide debris and rock hard sun crust. One of my crampons blew off making it a little scary, but Louie bailed me out luckily. We reached the col and began to climb towards the summit of Mt. Duke, getting our brains cooked in the sun! Unfortunately we got turned around about 30m short of the summit because the rime got super nasty to climb on, and the cornices were a little out of control. So we opted to ski down the ridge and find a better spot to drop in. Does it go? not with 15m of cornice on the entrance! But this one does…louie dropping in: Slashing some good turns: We decided to skin back up the bowl and try to reach the summit that way…but again at the top the cornices got just a little out of control to want to be under them for too long so we ended it 100m short of the top and had to ski more blower pow instead. If this is what failure is like, please let me fail more often… Skinning back up the Duke bowl: P4080265 by hutmaster, on Flickr P4080273 by hutmaster, on Flickr Next up was the climb up the other side of the duke-vantage col to Vantage Peak. This is a beautiful north facing slope. Luckily the climb was a bit more reasonable this time… Climbing up Vantage pk with the mt. Duke area in the background where the spent the first part of the day: Slaying the vantage north face: We finished off with one last skin up vantage ridge to the sub-peak and skied that at sunset back to the hut. All in all, these 2 days were some of the best touring I’ve done. Hopefully everybody likes the pics. Day 3 the weather came in again and we just had to ski more pow in the trees…oh well. Pics are a combo of mine, LeeLau (http://www.leelau.net/sharonandlee/duffey-duke-and-vantage/ and http://www.leelau.net/sharonandlee/matier-tiwn-one/, Louie, and Stu (hutmaster on flikr). April 13, 2011 at 9:25 pm #639262 tortoise 34 Posts damn. nice work. April 13, 2011 at 9:42 pm #639263 jbaysurfer 947 Posts @wilkez wrote: Hopefully everybody likes the pics. LOL! Yeah..there’s little doubt about that. :thatrocks: Great tour, great pics. Looks awesome! April 14, 2011 at 6:05 am #639264 NoKnees 336 Posts Nice work! And yah, the photos are a nice plus too.. 😉 Way to go big.. Love the exposure on the top of that face day one… The photo there is sweet… The rest are money too, no doubt… Good stuff… Greg - NoKnees April 14, 2011 at 6:08 am #639265 karkis 270 Posts aw yeh west coast!!! lookin good, nice work!! never summer snowboards phantom splitboard bindings dynafit touring atomic boots April 14, 2011 at 4:10 pm #639261 barrows 1490 Posts Way to go Wilkez, that looks like a fabulous couple of days! Sweet. April 14, 2011 at 9:34 pm #639266 surfsnowywaves 60 Posts hotDAMN. joffre looks amazing! i’d like to tag the line that connects the snowfields near the top to the big line that sorta comes down the right shoulder. Or just drop down the left hand side gully. Way to take advantage of killer conditions, looks like you guys had a blast out there! April 16, 2011 at 8:34 pm #639267 strain 42 Posts Rad TR. Epic light on that Matier summit shot, makes me jealous as a photographer and a rider, good work. @andrewstrain April 17, 2011 at 3:32 pm #639268 ale_capone 864 Posts Awesome and then some! Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total) You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
