Zoa Peak and Manning Park

Wes and Tina, who we met last weekend at Baldy, invited us to join them at Manning Park on Sunday. We were keen to ski at a new place but less keen on the 5:00am start that it required. So to break up the drive we went to Zoa Peak on Saturday which in a roundabout way allowed us to get to Manning on Saturday night with minimal extra driving. Zoa is at "B" and Manning is at "C" on this map.



Google Street View has recently become available in our area. This is the Zoa trailhead in summer. The snowy peaks on the left are Nak and Thor Thar. Zoa is the rather unimpressive looking ridge on the right.


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Zoa is an okay destination for an easy non-committing kind of day. The north facing slopes off the summit only provide about 200m of vertical, maybe less. We saw some neat hoar frost on the trees on the way up.



The ski out on the road cut can be either a mellow slide home or diabolical survival ski. Today was the latter on re-frozen snowmobile tracks. Yech.

Continuing on our way we eventually found the Cambie Creek trailhead in Manning and settled down in the parking lot for the night. In the morning we were surprised to find some sort of outdoor education camp set up just on the other side of the parking lot snowbank.



As we were having breakfast they trooped by en masse to go watch the Olympic torch pass by on the highway. Meh. I'm fed up with the Olympics.

Joined by Sandy, Wes, Sid, and Tina, we skied up the Fat Dog ski trail for several kilometers before heading up a small knoll. There was some mellow skiing from the top and we just enjoyed being out somewhere new.

I'm not sure this location would be worth another 3 hour drive from Kelowna, not when we could be in Rogers Pass with the same amount of driving. But as always it was just good to be out skiing.