Cayoosh Cols

On Monday March 20(aka the first day of Spring), I had an awesome day. My dad, my dog and I left our house at 6:15 hoping to reach the summit of Cayoosh mountain. It is accessed from the Duffy lake road. In the parking lot for Cayoosh there was only one other vehicle. My dad unloaded our antique snow mobile. We started up the logging road and watched the sun glow on the mountains, but it didn’t actually rise for another hour. Joffre and Mattier looked especially amazing. We took the left hand fork when the road turned right near the end. This took us about 100 meters above the other road. We left our sled at 7:30. We followed a trail into the boulder field that had slide covering it. We crossed it and kept on the trail into the trees. Soon enough we were at the small lake, it had avalanche debris touching it. This section would usually be dangerous, but since it had recently slid we knew it wouldn’t slide again. Last Winter my family had come up here for my sister first time ski touring I remembered how long it had taken us to get to this part. We cut off into the right hand trees and ascended to the small ridge that lead to the glacier. We were climbing a lot faster than I had predicted. It had been an hour since we left our sled, looking down we could see it. We drank and ate then continued onto the open slope. When we reached the glacier we could see that there were many large cornices hanging off the summit ridge of Cayoosh. We saw that the tracks we were following (probably from one day before) went to the climbers right col. Once we were about half way up the glacier my dad said that we wouldn’t be able to go to the top. If one of the cornices fell it would very likely trigger a deep avalanche. He said that we might go to the col that the tracks lead to, but we ended up going to the climbers left hand col. Once we got there the view of Joffre and Mattier was incredible. I said that I wanted to go there again, the glacier is so beautiful.

We were at 2250 meters, about the same elevation as the Joffre-Mattier col. It was only 10 and we had until 2. We decided to ski down and the hike up again to a col on the ridge across from us. We took some pictures and then headed down. We skied to the skiers right of the other tracks. The skiing was pretty good. Every time I go into the back country I am amazed at how much better it is than skiing at a resort. It was a bit wind effected but still smooth.

We passed over our up-track and skied to the left, towards the cabin. From there the skiing became a bit worse. We hit the crust formed when the snow had melted the previous day and then frozen overnight. We hit a steeper section where we set off a few small avalanches. The largest was hardly a size one.

From there on we were in the trees. The skiing was okay in the trees but we stopped fairly quickly. We found a up-track and put our skins on. This track was not very good so as soon as we could get out into the boulder field we did. We met up with the most used skin track as we saw another group of two ahead us us. After passing through the trees and almost to the lake we caught up to the couple. We greeted each other and made small talk for a few minutes. We went by them and continued up. Soon we passed the spot where our family had stopped last time we were here. After that I thought we didn’t have much farther to go, I thought we would be going up to a col to our left. A while later we hadn’t turned left so I realized we must be going somewhere else. My dad was ahead of me, too far to talk to him. We started ascending a gentle ridge and I was a bit confused to where we were going. I thought since we couldn’t get to where we had planned we would just turn around. It became very windy as we hiked up. My ears became very cold, I didn’t stop because I thought we would be turning around soon. As I looked around I saw two places where we might be headed. The closer was slightly to the left of where we were, the farther was straight in front of us. Soon enough my dad said that we were almost there. It became very windy and the snow was scoured and icy. When the snow was like that your skins do not stick very well onto the snow. As I came to where my dad had stopped my ears were the coldest they have ever been because of the wind. Putting my jackets on I was scared that I would drop a glove and it would be swept away.

The wind was whipping at about 80 km an hour. As we took our skins off my dog was trying to get out of the wind, she tried to dig a hole but gave up and started whining. The col we were at was about 2100 meters high, lower than the other col but it seemed like a different world. The first one was sunny and super nice while the second was super windy and cloudy. We didn’t eat anything and left as soon as we could. Starting to descend we saw that the lighting was pretty flat. Soon we passed the couple, they were heading up what was left of our track. The ridge part of our descent wasn’t good skiing but after that it was pretty good.

We had to double pole and shuffle for a while when passing the lake. We reached the snow mobile and loaded up our skis. We were a bit late so we quickly sledded down and put the snow mobile onto the truck. It was a good day, we didn’t make the summit but we got some great skiing in and exercised. I also got to see signs of instability and talk about the consequences and probability of cornice fall causing avalanches.