Mt. (Confidential)

Mt (Confidential)

This is a story of a trip that happened Saturday December 16. Because it was to a secret location, I am not allowed to tell you anything about getting there, or make any recommendations, and we didn’t take any pictures, but here goes. I had been there once, forty years ago, in the spring and it was only memorable because on that trip I had forgotten my boots at home and had to hike through the snow in my Hush Puppies.

We were a mixed crew, a carload. Mixed crew because Carla had snowshoes, Edward had a new splitboard, William and I had AT skis, and Kevin had Club tele gear. Because Kevin took out his gear so close to the Winter Holiday, he was not able to obtain two matching tele boots, but he said that they were “close enough”. Presumably somebody else also took out two unmatched boots, so we wish them luck on that. The purpose of the Adventure was to ski the abundant powder and to check out the mystery hut that had been discovered up there, the previous weekend. I think I was invited because I have a 4WD Jeep, which was to get us closer to our objective than the Dodge Caravan that was used up there on the previous weekend.

The night before did not go well with me. For some unknown reason I woke up at 2:15 am soaked in sweat. The bed was so wet that I thought maybe I’d peed it. Don’t know what that was all about. By morning I was trying to think of good excuses to stay home, but we had lots of drivers and some enthusiasm, so I figured if things were bad enough I could just sleep in the Jeep and wait for the others to do their thing.

So (details omitted for secrecy) we parked and removed the utensils from the roof rack, and set off. I decided that the white stuff was not powder so I left my skis at the car. Carla similarly left her snow shoes. Those on slidey things took off at a faster pace than us but we found them about three km up the (details omitted), where they had finally decided that powder was not going to happen so we should go home. This we did. Walking down the (omitted) was about as fast as sliding, so we didn’t have to wait for each other.

Conclusions: Don’t assume it will be powdery this weekend just because it was powdery last weekend.

No powder was skied. No hut was photographed. Good exercise was had. I’ll probably revisit the area again after all the snow goes away. The hut remains to be rediscovered; apparently there’s a sign on it which says something like “motorized access (snowmobiles) only. Skiers keep out.”