Malakwa is about a 2 hour drive north of Kelowna (map). The skiing here is accessed by driving up an active logging road that is maintained throughout the winter. Ah yes, logging, a mixed blessing here in BC. You generally need a 4-wheel or an all-wheel drive vehicle to make it up the road in winter -- or at least a vehicle with good clearance and tire chains. Last year we typically skied at kilometer 15 and 18. The terrain there is just fantastic. This year the road will be maintained only to kilometer 12 and perhaps even less than that after Christmas. So today turned into a bit of an exploratory trip on the terrain around 12k.
Due to said battery malfunction I only managed a couple of photos. Here's Fred at the trailhead with his magnificent $25 skis...
Brenda and Steve doing the boot shuffle...
To make a long story short we didn't make a lot of turns in today. I think after a couple of hours we realized that this would be the case and we resigned ourselves to simply trying to connect this new area with the other areas that we were already familiar with. We slogged up an existing skin track for 3-4 hours and thank goodness there was a track because trail breaking was brutal. We made our way along a ridge line kind of wondering where we were. The sun broke through on one side of the ridge and we realized that we were above the north facing bowl which is the main feature of the kilometer 15 area. The south winds had loaded the bowl with fresh snow and there was a large fracture line near the top as well as other signs of recent avalanche activity. Needless to say we didn't ski it.
Anyway the point of this long post and of mentioning the whole camera thing is that here we were treated to the amazing spectacle of a Brocken Spectre.
A what!? To quote Wikipedia...
"A Brocken spectre...is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer cast...upon the upper surfaces of clouds that are below the mountain upon which the observer stands. The spectre appears when the sun shines from behind a climber who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist. The light projects the climber's shadow forward through the mist. The head of the figure is often surrounded by the glowing halo-like rings of coloured light."
We each cast a giant shadow that hovered in the distance and was ringed by circles of rainbow like colours.
It was quite a sight. Here are some Brocken Spectre images via Google Image search.
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