Manning Park Ski

This week Dean and I went to Manning Park and spent two days backcountry skiing.

Day 1 Fat Dog Trail and Day 2 Windy Joe

On Tuesday we followed the Fat Dog Ski Trail up to the ridge between Big Buck Mountain and Three Brothers Mountain.

A rare photo of me courtesy of Dean

We made it to the ridge (where the Heather Trail is in the summer) right at our turn-around time of 3pm. We followed our tracks back and made it back to the car for dusk.

Day 2 we followed the Windy Joe Mountain trail up to the fire lookout cabin at the summit, There was lots of deadfall on the trail.

The route starts on a cross country trail

The hut had some nice views on the top!

The ski down through the trees was fun!

Dean was excited!

A few notes:

-Simple terrain means this is a great area to visit when avalanche risk is high.

-We stayed the night at the Manning Park Resort What a joy to be able to dry our clothes and have a burger for dinner!

Mt Sproatt Ski Attempt

Yesterday Brent and I attempted to ski Mount Sproatt. We started from the Rainbow Lake Trail which is located just West of Whistler.

The red lines are very approximate!

We started skinning up.

Narrow creek bridges were tricky!

Around the 3km mark we left the trail and started heading up into the trees and gaining elevation. This is the route described in John Baldwin's book. It was tough skinning up in the the super crunchy snow. It was slow moving and eventually we decided to turn around before we ran out of time!

Brent kept his split board as skis for the way down!

Once we hit the road we got to pick up a little speed.

Go Brent Go!!

One note:

-On snowshoes we probably would have made the summit. I still have a lot to learn about backcountry skiing and skinning up steep terrain.