Sphinx Dreams May Contain Surprises

Derek and Mia Fajeau still smiling on Saturday afternoon

I had never led a VOC trip before, but I knew that as an exec, I was expected to lead two trips/year. I’d been meaning to get to Burton Hut for a while, just because it seems like such a cool place. When Joe O’Brien told be you could summit the Sphinx with only an ice axe, it seemed like the ideal objective for a weekend trip. I dubbed my trip “Advanced Beginner friendly” thinking that this would act as a magical amulet to ward off they typical problems of VOC trips: faff and slowness. It looked like perfect avi conditions: a downward trend, with the bulletin predicting mod-low-low for sat/sun. At the pretrip I convinced everyone it would be a great idea to skin up to Burton on Friday night (I want to put a better word that convinced, but I really can’t think of one). Since we were a group of Advanced Beginners, I assumed everyone would have around my level of fitness. I estimated it would take me 4 hours from trailhead to Burton, so I guesstimated 5 hours for the group. At the pretrip I asked if people were prepared for doing 15km and 1000m of vertical with a pack in 5 hours. I saw smiles and nods from my group. I figured we’d leave Vancouver at 17:00 and after 2 hours of driving and a little trailhead faff, 5 hours of skinning and breaks, we’d be in bed at midnight. Climb Sphinx and slay pow on Saturday, vegetate and ski down on Sunday. It was the stuff of dreams. No matter how sweet the dream, reality is always there to remind you of why those are only dreams.

Our trip started with a pleasant drive through Vancouver’s rush hour traffic. After grabbing dinner, my car group rolled into the lower Rubble Creek parking lot at 20:00, an hour after we were supposed to be there. Fortunately for us, the earliest car had only beat us by about 10 minutes. After 30 ish minutes of trailhead faff we were on our way up the snowy logging road. Right off the bat, some people were faster than others. I told myself we were find and that people were adjusting their bindings and getting used to their equipment. Kudos to Andrew Midwinter for bringing up the rear and making sure nobody was left behind. Progress up was a little slower than I had expected, but I was pleasantly surprised to notice that John Clarke’s map marked the first few switchbacks perfectly, and showed only 12 total, much shorter than I remembered! This felt like a liberating departure from the vague and often misleading squiggles that most maps show. Believing I knew exactly how far we had left, I felt no need to check my watch. After noticing switchback 10 or so was the wrong shape, I realized I had been led astray about the number of switchbacks in the trail by John Clarke’s map. I had a sudden and horrible feeling there were a lot more than 12 switchbacks. I checked my watch: It was 23:45. Yikes. I had planned that we’d be well onto the lake by now. Oh well, we must be close. Better press on! There were lots of breaks for the faster people, who would easily get 2 or 3 switchbacks ahead and wouldn’t realize it until a headlamp was seen below in the darkness. It was only cold if you stopped moving for more than a few minutes.The slow group got slower and the breaks grew longer. Sometime later, a message was passed up to me that some people at the back were really suffering and I should go and motivate them. The faster people didn’t want to stand around and get cold, so I gave them a radio and asked them to meet me at the Garibaldi Lake Warming Shelter. They were out of sight quickly. It was about 2:00. I stayed with the slower group, who was primarily suffering from bonking, and possibly underestimation of the difficulties of skinning with an overnight pack. We planned to deposit slower people at the warming hut, but upon arrival (at 4:00ish) discovered that everyone “fast” was setting up to sleep in the warming shelter. Vanny Pornsinsiriruk had fallen asleep facedown on the table before I arrived. After falling asleep at around 4:30, the sun woke us up around 7:30. Everyone was getting ready to leave at 8:00 ish. I walked outside the shelter and saw a warden chatting with people in my group. Being the Trip Leader, it seemed reasonable that I should talk to the warden. She asked for our camping permits, which of course we didn’t have, as we didn’t need them for sleeping at Burton Hut. (I think this contains the relevant details http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?1,124725) I explained that we were trying to make it to Burton last night, and had camped here due to exhaustion of some members. I said it was unintentional, and we would be happy to pay whatever fines we had incurred. The Ranger said it would be $144 dollars. I didn’t think that was so bad, so I started asking how to pay it when she added “per person”. I gasped audibly. There were 10 of us.

The next section of the story may or may not be true. What is true (in my experience) is that Rangers are generally interested in public safety, and generally reasonable people, so long as you are not an asshole who thinks they’re above the rules. Rules like paying your campsite fees.

The Ranger said “Yeah, it’s a lot but lets keep talking. Where you guys from? What are your plans at Burton?”

“It’s a VOC trip, we’re planning to ski the Sphinx this weekend but…”

After a miracle may or may not have occurred, the Ranger may or may not have let us off the hook, asked us to pay the regular camping fee, and not to gloat about it.

We now return to the regular, truthful trip report.

It was a beautiful day and there was not expected to be any weather coming in so I declared the ski across the lake a “faff at your own pace event”. All of us had made it to the hut by about 11:00. Nobody had ambitions to do the Sphinx that day, so we faffed around the hut, ate, napped and went for a mellow tour around the back of the lake. Sam Vivant and Paul, a Non-VOC’er joined us at the hut. We saw lots of sluff activity on steep solar features but when we dug a pit, even when I jumped on the shovel, the column didn’t budge an inch. I tried ski cutting a 40 degree convex roll and had the snow right beneath my skis budge by about 10 cm. It was unbelievably stable. There were some sweet looking 45 degree slopes with lots of untracked powder, but unfortunately it was 16:00 and there was a bigass cornice way way above them. We decided not to tempt fate into handing us a nightmare. Back at the hut, I taped up the soles of my feet, which were missing at least half of their skin. This was also the first time I experienced blisters in the backcountry. I had never had any before that. I suspect it was due to the combo of a) the athlete’s foot problem I recently developed and b) the fact my feet were wet through the whole switchback slog. Fortunately, climbing tape fixes everything. After a post dinner meeting, we abandoned the Sphinx. Ambitious people like Paul, Sam, Alia, and Derek Hiemstra planned to summit Mt. Price on Sunday morning. Most of us fell asleep between 20:00 and 21:00. I woke up at around 7:00 the next day. Derek was on my left, getting up and getting ready, while Sam was fast asleep on my right. “Derek” I said “are you serious about going up Mt. Price today?”. He replied “Oh yeah, I wanna climb my first mountain”. I lay in my sleeping bag for 25 minutes arguing with myself about whether it was acceptable to bail on summiting a peak on my own trip. I decided it wasn’t. Derek, Paul, Alia Sanger, and I left Burton at 8:30 to go climb Price. Sam was in bed when we left but caught up to us in no time. Slogging up to the lower peak, the snow looked awesome. I was moving too slowly, so Sam offered to take the two half ropes I was carrying to speed things along. It didn’t feel like much weight in my hands when I lifted them out of my pack, but when I put my pack on and started skinning I was instantly faster. Sam, Paul and I made it to the summit of Price, while Derek and Alia opted to stay on nearby Clinker Peak. The descent down from was the best snow all of us had ever skied on the coast: abundant, yet light and fluffy. It was kind of surface hoar-y. We met with everyone else at the Garibaldi Lake Shelter at 14:00 as planned. It was fairly uneventful after that. We skied down and met at Mags 99 for dinner. Everyone seemed to have had fun, despite the suffering. Amazingly, most of the people on that trip ended up joining the exec or the PSG the year after.

Boring but useful problem dissection of what happened: from the beginning I was very optimistic about how long it would take us to get to Burton hut. Mistake number 2 was not adjusting expectations and estimations when it we were all late and again when it became obvious we were moving slower than expected. Mistake number 3 was trusting the number of switchbacks on the map.There are probably around 20 switchbacks. Mistake 4 was not checking my watch early and often. Mistake 5 is something I still debate with myself: Should I have sent people back to the cars at midnight? at 2:00? Obviously things turned out okay this time. Is skiing down the icy, narrow rubble creek trail in the dark while exhausted better than slogging a few more km? Is sleeping in your car better than in the warming shelter? I still think failing upwards was the safer move by the time it was that late.

The moral of the story is: don’t be the guy taking people on their first night time approach. It’s not as brilliant as you think. Also, I strongly recommend you always be nice to Rangers, especially those at Garibaldi.

Andrew Midwinter chillin hard