Maddy, Cam, & I spent a nice night at the foot of the Anniversary Glacier on Saturday. There was a group of high school kids there learning some mountaineering basics. But apparently this is no ordinary high school, it's one on Vancouver Island where they have a climbing gym and all the kids can climb during an "elective" block and get credit for it as a class. So they all climb crazy hard.
Where is this place?
We woke up at a leisurely time with a plan to ski the NW face of Matier. After a couple rounds of coffee we were ready to go. As you can see, it took about 5 minutes to walk to snow from camp, not too bad.
We very slowly made our way up the Anniversary Glacier (winter is so much faster). It took us over 2 hours to get to the Joffre - Matier col. I felt sluggish, although I knew we weren't in any rush to get to the NW face since it would still be completely in shade for another hour or so.
Aussie Couloir isn't quite ski-able
The NW face looked pretty nice and the bergschrund was open, but it seemed pretty straight forward. We decided to cross it where it was well bridged and traverse the snow to the rocky outcrop. The traverse was a little spooky. It was obvious that this patch of snow was starting to "tilt" away from the rock and it seemed as though it was hardly touching anything underneath. It was just hanging in space above the schrund. There was also copious amounts of water streaming off the face, under this patch of snow, then into the bergschrund. To make it even more fun, Cam had forgotten his ice axe, so we decided to short rope him up the face. I'm sure it was all pretty spicy for him.
The snow on the face had frozen a bit on top, but there were frequent "patches" where the snow was rotten and hadn't gone through a freeze cycle in a while. I assumed that these were thinner areas over crevasses or free flowing water under a thin area of ice. About halfway up the face, beside the large section of blue ice, I heard a large settlement. It took me a couple seconds to fully grasp what it was. I thought it may have been a snow bridge that I was on that was perhaps collapsing, but as I turned to ask Cam and Maddy if they heard it too, I could see the horror on their faces. This thing sounded like a winter settlement over hoar frost. I started to have flash backs from April pop into my head, but this face seemed like it had much more consequence and I doubted there would be any memories if something were to start moving. It took about half a second to decide that we weren't going to be skiing this. I started to move faster and began rising to lookers left, towards the main summit. As we got higher the snow got better and became more solid, excellent for stability, but shitty for someone who doesn't have an ice-axe (Cam). Looking up, I couldn't remember if there was a final crevasse crossing the summit slope or not. It rolled away a bit and I hoped it was just snow to the end.
Wrong.
I came across a rather large hole. I could traverse right and down-climb slightly in order to bypass it, but I would be very exposed, and I'd be forcing Cam to do some rather delicate ice slab climbing over shifty snow bridges. I decided to climb in and belay Cam and Maddy up to me. Luckily on a face like this, the wall of the crevasse is lower angle than the slope and made for a comfy belay. When they joined me, I moved Maddy nearer the end of the rope with Cam and did an awkward traverse over a very rotten and crumbly snow bridge. I will refrain from commenting on my style and technique, but I made it up to rock and belayed Cam and Maddy across the bridge and up the slope to join me.
The face and said belay crevasse
Easier Terrain at the top of the face
An easy scramble led to the summit and we lounged for a bit with a couple that had climbed the North East Spur. They told us that there was plenty of snow on their route, so this re-affirmed our decision to avoid the rotten 50 degree shite.
Ski boot scrambling:
We scrambled down the ridge a bit then headed down towards the Joffre - Matier col. The very top of the snow was solid ice, so we did a funky ice-rock offwidth (it was wet and dirty) to get to a place to put our skis on. From there, we had a few hundred meters of nicely angled turns. The sun cups weren't that bad, and the skiing was fun.
This schrund was WAY more mellow.
The sun cups on the anniversary were soft (for the most part) and the skiing was pretty fun
Thanks to my rock skis, I managed to ski to within 5 minutes of camp. We basked in the sun and ate lunch, then headed out. Camp & our turns on the Anniversary.
Despite, not skiing our original objective, it was still a fun ski of roughly a 1000m of vertical.
Our ski down from the hike out. We skied the sunny snow field:
Cam's Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/1056234765 ... redirect=1
