Hermit Meadows

On Friday night Brenda and I drove to Revelstoke for a "Revy Weekend" at Cat's place. On arrival we found Fred, Ken, and Janice already nicely settled in and well on their way through a fourth bottle of wine. It was Ken's fiftieth and he was celebrating in fine style.

The Canadian Avalanche Center had issued a special advisory for the weekend...

"... the combination of the winter's near record snowfalls combined with extraordinary winds creating unprecedented conditions. The result is isolated but exceptionally large avalanches, involving the entire winter snowpack."

We saw evidence of this on the drive to the pass. A huge avalanche had come down on the east side of the highway, run across the valley bottom for several hundred meters, and then climbed up the west side, burying the highway. It had been cleared away for the most part but the giant snowbanks on either side filled with trees and debris were an obvious reminder.

With this in mind our objective for the day was Hermit Meadows. Generally the terrain here is mellow and consequently the avalanche hazard quite low. Well, it's hard to make generalizations like that I suppose. Suffice it to say that if you choose an intelligent line then you don't expose yourself to any giant slopes above.

It was a stunning day -- freezing cold but with clear blue skies from one horizon to the other. I had only been here in the summer and I was very happy to make a winter visit. We had a great day of skiing but I don't think it would have mattered if we hadn't made a single turn today. It was just so nice to be out under blue skies with unlimited views in every direction.





I'll admit to an ulterior motive in choosing Hermit. The Little Sifton traverse, which begins in the Connaught drainage and crosses over Little Sifton, then decends via Hermit Meadows. The key to the traverse is to descend a steep north facing slope from the Little Sifton col down to Hermit Meadows. I had wanted to do this trip since last year and was keen to check out this part of route.

As luck would have it we ran into another group that was descending from the traverse. To use phrases that I am far too uncool to use we "pumped them for beta" and were "stoked" to try the traverse the next day.

(The word "stoked" should be banned from any usage associated with skiing. Who's with me here?)

Very few photos of actual skiing today but I did shoot a bunch of video. Hopefully I'll find some time to stitch the footage together later this week. However I noticed that Picasaweb allows you to upload video now. Here's an album from today with some raw video footage.

And finally here's Fred dealing with the last challenge of the day...surmounting the snowbank the separates us from Brenda's car parked on the other side!