Duke Couloir

Trip Dates: Feb 15th – Feb 17th 2025

Participants: Lorin Jacot, Viv Liu, Skye McDonald, Ed Riley, Quintus Zhou

Report written by Ed Riley with sections from Quintus Zhou and Skye McDonald.

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The French word ‘couloir’ directly translates to the English word ‘corridor’. It’s therefore easy to see how thin gullies and chutes on mountains have come to be known as couloirs. Couloirs are often narrow, steep and hemmed in by towering rock walls. Some will reach from almost summit to valley floor. On the other hand, they can be broader, shorter and all together less intimidating. The couloir off the side of Mount Duke falls into the prior category with the exception of being quite short. It represents my idea of what a stereotypical couloir should look like; it’s thin, (moderately) steep, and completely surrounded by vertical rock walls. If you asked good ol’ ChatGPT to show you what a couloir looks like, it might return Duke.

Duke Couloir, if it wasn’t obvious enough…

We decided on Duke after some WhatsApp faff and on Saturday Feb 15th, our group of 5 (Me, Viv Liu, Quintus Zhou, Lorin Jacot, Skye McDonald) headed up to the Duffey to make the most of the long weekend. We decided we would camp in Caspar Creek and ski Duke on Sunday or Monday depending on which day conditions were more favourable.

Sunday, although teasing clear conditions in the morning, turned out to be grey and Duke wasn’t visible behind the clouds. After agreeing to go for the couloir on Monday, we still managed to ski some fun lines off Vantage Peak and surrounding areas. Skye had a scary tomahawk when riding off Vantage:

“After spending an hour booting up a couloir on the backside of Vantage, I (Skye) was last to drop. The top of the couloir was steep, narrow, and rocky. I dropped in on my heel side and nearly immediately clipped a rock that sent me tumbling. I tried to self arrest but couldn’t hold on to my axe. My binding came off my board and I tomahawked half way down the couloir. Eventually I came to a stop and had lost my ice axe and goggles. I ended up completely fine- uninjured, but with major edge damage and my confidence shook. This was the biggest fall I’ve taken in the backcountry, very thankful that I wasn’t over any exposure.”

Our tracks off Vantage. PC: Skye McDonald

After regrouping, with none of our group owning a RAD line, we stashed the heavy 70m cragging rope under a tree ready for the next day.

By 7:30 a.m. on Monday, we were ready and raring to go. But there was a potential problem. It was looking even more clagged in than the day before. Though after 20 minutes of skinning, all our worries of bad vis disappeared, and we emerged into blue sky and the cloud base way above us.

Skinning out of the lingering cloud

We made quick progress to the rope stash at the Duke-Vantage col and followed, and surpassed, our skin track from the day before. Once the terrain was sufficiently steep, we donned crampons, removed axes from bags and put our skis on our backs ready for a short boot to the entrance of the couloir.

Lorin taking in the view of the huge face of Matier

Maybe 30 minutes later, a quick check of the GPS confirmed we had arrived at the entrance to the couloir. Duke has a bit of a reputation for having an impressively sized cornice guarding its entrance and as such we couldn’t see into the couloir from the top without getting dangerously close to the cornice’s edge. However, a quick walk around the rim of the couloir allowed us to look into the entrance and confirmed the cornice was big and the start was going to be STEEP!

Upper section of the couloir

Mouth of the couloir

After a supremely scenic lunch, we dug out a T-slot, buried the 2×4 and prepared to rap over the cornice. Lorin would go first, me 2nd, Skye 3rd, Viv 4th and Quintus last. As will become apparent in the later sections of the report, Quintus probably regrets his decision to go last…! To mitigate our collective exposure to standing directly under a 15ft tall cornice, we rapped and skied one-by-one. Lorin made it down sans problèmes and radio’d up to relay this information. Me, Skye and Viv also made it down without much issue. The skiing was steep and (very, at points) narrow.

Viv in the couloir. PC: Skye McDonald

Viv shredding. PC: Skye McDonald

Before Quintus had started the rap, Lorin (carrying one of the radios) and I had set off for a short lap in view of Skye and Viv waiting safely at the bottom of the couloir. It was then that Quintus radio’d that the rope was stuck. No amount of pulling was freeing the rope. With Quintus’ rope ascending skills a little rusty, Lorin gave step-by-step instructions over the radio on how to ascend using only prusiks. Around an hour of toil later, little progress was being made in making it back over the cornice, so Lorin made the decision to boot all the way back up to Quintus to help. In the end, the rope was simply heavily twisted (made worse by Quintus free hanging when trying to ascend) and was relatively easy to free once the issue had been identified.

Quintus’ account of trying to free the rope is here:

“More on the stuck rope: So, as a first-time mountaineer, I had on my harness a 40cm prusik, a 70cm prusik, and a 60cm sling. I had purposely brought the minimum amount of gear to be ultra-light. Vivian double-checked with me and asked if I was sure that I’d be fine, and I thought “What could possibly go wrong?” So she dropped in, leaving me to the awesome silence of being alone on a mountain. Moments like these remind me of the scale of the cosmos. In all our “glory” standing atop a mountain we have “conquered,” clothed in expensive jackets and shiny gear, we expect the sound of trumpets but eternity only stares back in indifference. Anyways, time to ski a sick couloir. The rappel went well. I untied the stopper knots, clipped one end of the rope to me and started skiing. Behold, the thing that went wrong: I did not know that as the last person to rappel, I needed to make sure the rope didn’t get twisted. So, there I was, dangling on one end of the rope in the middle of Duke Couloir. I called out on the radio, hoping Lorin would have some clever solution. But his instructions were: make 2 prusiks, ascend the rope. Oh god, I have never actually tried this in the field. I did a mixture of ascending the rope and bootpacking until I got back up to the cornice. Now I’ll have to fully rely on the prusiks. I struggled awkwardly up the rope, getting sprung around. And here was the biggest problem: that 40cm prusik, barely wraps around the rope 3 times. The moment I put my weight on it, it started to slide along the frozen rope. That was not a good feeling: the only thing connecting me to the rope did not hold. I tried again with the sling in an autoblock, but it also didn’t hold. I think I could’ve got it to work with more tries but I did not like the thought of being attached to the rope upside-down via my foot loop, and thought of “maybe I can pull it down if I just yanked hard enough” was starting to become very appealing. So I radioed that I was gonna go back down and try yanking it. I rappelled back down to my skis, tied myself in a deadman, and began the yanking. During this process Lorin started bootpacking up from the bottom. I was making a little bit of progress pulling the rope, but it eventually got fully stuck. Thankfully Lorin is insanely fast and had 2 microtraxions. We briefly exchanged info and he went up to ascend the rope while I skied down. The couloir was icy at this point, and I was so tired from my fight with the rope. But it was still fun and definitely an experience to remember. I waited at the bottom for Lorin who managed to get the rope down. We reflected on my mistakes and skied down at sunset. After a few hours of running down the skin track, we caught up with the splitboarders.

Reflections:  I was very happy to gain this learning experience without putting myself in too much danger but felt sorry for the friends waiting for me and Lorin who boot-packed up. Going last was definitely a bad decision for me: I had enough experience to do it, but not enough experience to problem-solve if anything went wrong. The main takeaway for me is to always assume that something will go wrong in mountaineering and to apply this both to the gear I bring and to the decisions I make. Also, I need to wake up earlier so that we have time if things go wrong.”

Lorin boots back up the couloir to free the rope.

Following a long, dark, and very flat slog back to the car, we made it to Pemberton’s only fine-dining establishment: McDonald’s. Dissatisfied with our Big Macs and chicken nuggets, we made a second stop at another haute-cuisine restaurant: Squamish Domino’s. Finally satisfied and nourished, we got back Vancouver at around 12:30 a.m.