Saturday, December 24, 2005

While in Whistler between the NIPS workshops and a meeting in Seattle, I took a day tour in the area of the Spearhead Glacier, guided by ACMG mountain guide Chris Lawrence working that day for the Whistler Alpine Guides Bureau. The day was cold. Ongoing snow squalls impaired visibility but laid a couple of inches of nice fluff on top of mostly windpacked snow. The picture shows a view of the glacier from one of the cols we climbed (more pictures). The bleak landscape offers an intense contrast with the lush coastal forest around Whistler, and with the shopping mall atmosphere of Whistler Village just a few miles away. It's a cliché, but I felt really small on the rock and ice of the Spearhead, crawling along on skis or scrambling up crumbling ridges to reach various cols. The counter-clockwise route is sketched approximately on the topo map fragment. We went from the Blowhole at the top of the Showcase T-bar to the Blackcomb glacier road via a traverse along the top of the Blackcomb glacier, a skin up to a col behind Blackcomb mountain, a short drop and traverse to a scramble to another col (on the Spearhead ridge above the glacier, I believe), a ski down avoiding a few crevasses, skin up to another col (with a fortunately idle helipad, thanks to the bad weather), a nice descent down to the glacier on the new fluff, still carefully avoiding crevasses, a skin up to a steep snow slope, bootpacking and rapeling the rest to the col above Corona bowl, descending the nice snow at the top of Corona Bowl, and then side-slipping, scrambling, and glacial gravel/dirty snow skiing down to the Blackcomb glacier road, for a long traverse back to the Blackcomb gondola mid-station for downloading. Round trip time, with breaks, around six hours. 4:55:35 PM