North Joffre Boomerang

Author: Julian Larsen

Trip Dates: February 15-17th, 2025

Trip Participants: Julian Larsen, Erik Reimers, Leon Chen, Stefanija Rekasius, Sri Chaitanya, Nadia Tarazi, Harrison Crerar

At the beginning of 2025 I moved to Squamish for an 8 month co-op placement. While this brings many benefits, it meant I couldn’t join any of the extensive reading week trips my friends had begun planning. Instead, I would have to make do with a regular long weekend. So with Family Day long weekend on the horizon and no concrete plans, I messaged Erik Reimers to propose a ski traverse. He told me he was signed up for a VOC trip run by Leon Chen doing the North Joffre Horseshoe traverse, and I should throw my name in as well. Since the stats seemed relatively mild we planned on bagging some extra peaks and skiing some additional lines if the conditions were good.

 DAY 1:

On Saturday morning we set off. The seven of us began cruising down the logging road that begins the path of our traverse. Quickly we branched off into tight small trees that avoid the marsh in the center of the valley. These trees posed rather complicated skinning, with many steep drops and skinny snow bridges. As we inadvertently knocked their branches, the tight trees blessed us with piles of snow to fill our jackets, pants, and boots. While only a very short section, this proved a first bottleneck which slowed the group significantly.

Once out in the open, we realized the marsh was very skinnable, and much smoother to travel. We followed it for a bit before veering off into the trees and up the mountain slope. After some tough skinning on sugary snow, Erik realized we probably should’ve followed the valley longer, but the path was still a viable way. As it steepened, skins became useless, and the only way to make uphill progress was to pull on alder branches and drag our bodies up the slope. I did a couple “dynos” between branches, and joked that I didn’t expect this to be a climbing trip. Eventually the skintrack ended, and cut sharply back towards the valley, where we could see a different group easily skinning up the open slope. Clearly whoever set this track had become frustrated enough to quit and go home. This section had proved a much greater bottleneck than the first, and Erik, Stefanija and I became worried as we saw no sign of the rest of the group for several minutes. Luckily nothing had gone wrong, and we decided to also cut down to the valley once the others began catching up.

In between us and the open slopes stood another barrier many a VOCer may battle with: alder. Realizing the skin track we were following was not reliable, Erik forged his own path through the alders and made it to the open slope. From there we watched as one at a time people became “stuck in alder jail” as Erik put it. We waited a long while and nervously checked the time. We had not made it very far from the car, and it was already the afternoon. One by one everyone made it out of jail, but not unscathed. Harrison’s relatively new frame binding had snapped, and no amount of backcountry repair was going to salvage it. Erik, being the fastest among us, decided he would shuttle Harrison to Whistler, and then skin up alone to meet us at camp. Given our late time at this point, we decided on a much earlier camp at a lake below Cassiope. It was quite smooth skinning to the camp, and we dug out holes for tents and an area for cooking. Snow was falling around us and visibility was poor. Before we had even finished dinner, Erik arrived out of the dark as the hero of the day (and as we will see, every day).

Crashes and “Alder Jail”

 Harrison’s Binding – Our First Casualty

 DAY 2:

We awoke to even worse visibility, and after warming up with breakfast, headed out for a decently big day. Quickly after crossing the lake, the slope steepens, and Stefanijas skins stopped sticking to her skis. Unfortunately no amount of cleaning helped, and ski straps were used as a last resort. By the time we made it to the pass between Cassiope and Saxifrage, we were all in relatively good spirits. We hoped to make up for our lack of progress the day before, but we weren’t making the best time, and the visibility was horrendous. Nonetheless, we were barely on track to make it to camp 2 on Place Glacier that day.

We transitioned to ski mode and Leon led the way down the steep glacier below Saxifrage. It was decent skiing conditions, but the light was so flat and the visibility so poor it was nearly impossible to see where we were going. Leon crashed in front of me and I skied over to him to see if he was okay. He said his ski had pre-released and went sliding down below him. No biggie I thought, I’ll just do a couple more turns and grab it for him. As I did this I realized he was right above a series of large cliffs that I couldn’t make out before due to the bad visibility. My optimism began to sink; this wasn’t looking so good. I contoured the cliffs and found no sign of Leon’s ski. The visibility was so poor in fact, that I couldn’t even tell if I was moving or not at times, so it’s no surprise I couldn’t make out the faint track of a lone ski. I followed the slope further, before seeing that the slope funneled into a large open valley. I made a checklist of hurdles in my mind: deep snow, poor visibility, huge search area, and a white ski – conclusion: we are doomed.

Erik and I started zig zagging through the valley searching, and others joined as they arrived. Erik booted back up to the cliffs to see if he could find any signs of the lost ski, but he found nothing. Leon had very quickly accepted the fact that he was hiking out. With shovels fastened to his boots as makeshift snowshoes, he started slogging his way back to our previous camp. The glacier was too steep to skin, so we all started booting up the long slope with our skis on our backs. Erik, always the hero, led the way with 3 skis on his back (Leon’s ski as well as his own pair). The snow was horrendous for bootpacking: deep, dry, and sugary. At one point I kept sliding down until my boots were skidding on a rock slab at the bottom of the snowpack. Swimming ability was most useful needed to get past some of these short cruxes. Once the slope was suitable for skinning Erik dug out a bench and we sat waiting for the rest of the group to arrive. Erik, feeling fit and heroic again, dropped his pack and went part way down to carry Sri’s up for him.

After skinning to the ridge we transitioned to downhill mode only to unveil a new gear issue to add on the pile. Stefanija fell to the very back, which was somewhat unusual. Her boots would not change to ski mode, so she was flailing her way down in walk mode instead. From the ridge, the highway was in sight. I tried to see if I could convince anyone to ski all the way to the car and drive out so we didn’t have to set up camp again, but by the time people arrived at the lake it was dark and nobody seemed stoked enough to join. I re-dug the hole for our tarp-tent and set everything back up in the same place. Another failed day.

Skiing Down The Glacier

Booting Up The Glacier

Smiling Through the Pain

 DAY 3:

It was a cold, and slow morning. During the night I had been jolted awake multiple times by loud popping. Erik arose to find several baffles on his sleeping pad had burst. The weather gods decided to gift us a bluebird day right when we didn’t need it, but at least we got to see our surroundings.

Breakfast At Camp

Leon, in a completely unrelated issue to having lost his ski, couldn’t get his boots on. It was so bad in fact, that after an hour of trying to force it on, the shell cracked. Leon decided to walk down in only his liners (strapped onto shovel blades of course). Once we made it into the valley, Erik and I broke ahead. At the beginning of the alders we started transitioning. Erik turned the first corner, and I started following, but my skin snagged on a branch and tore at the tip. I decided I would try going ski mode, as it was mostly downhill. There were several forks in the skin track and I opted for the more downhill one each time since I had no skins on. Eventually this deposited me in a creekbed at the bottom, where the tracks fizzled out and climbed back up. Absolutely defeated, I decided I would go back to skinning, but with only one skin on. With great effort on the short uphills, I gradually made my way towards the highway, kicking with my one skin and gliding with the other ski (similar to pushing on a scooter or skateboard). I passed Erik who had dropped his pack at the car and backtracked to grab Leon’s for him. Awkwardly scooting, I eventually cruised into the parking lot. Another gear failure for the list. Erik somehow arrived at the car again before anyone else, which made me worried something had gone awry (who could blame me given what had happened up to that point), but the rest of the crew came not too long after.

All Smiles At The Finish Line

All in all, we had spent 3 days and nearly (but not quite) made it our intended day one camp. Harrisons binding snapped, Leon’s ski was lost, Leon’s boot’s stopped fitting, Leon’s boot cracked (man Leon took a beating), Stefanija’s skins didn’t stick, Stefanija’s boots didn’t go into ski mode, Eriks pad exploded, and my skin tore. Everybody made it out relatively unscathed, but maybe Leon will have to leave a comment on whether any of his toes fell off when he got home. I’ve bailed on a number of things, but as far as failures go this was pretty colossal. Hopefully we all learned a bit about how to prevent something like this from happening again.