Camelids, the Letter Z and Dog Poop

On Saturday evening I decided that a reasonable thing to do would be to ski all the camelid-named peaks (Llama, Alpaca, Vicuña, Guanaco) and Z-named peaks (Zupjok, Zopkios, Zoa, Zum) in the Coquihalla.

My son wanted to play tennis with me, and my wife wanted us to watch School of Rock as a family, so that’s what I did instead of packing or looking at the route properly. I went to bed at midnight and packed in the morning.

School of Rock

My travel mug is old and decrepit, and as a result it’s getting progressively harder to get the lid to screw on straight. It’s got a two-start thread, and without some fiddling, both of the external threads will end up in the same internal thread. When I don’t get it right, coffee leaks through the lid as I drink, and I pour coffee all over myself. I carefully put the lid on, looked under to make sure that the threads were on evenly, started driving and poured coffee all over myself. I took the lid off, put it on again, double-careful, and poured coffee all over myself again. Despite reattempting to put the lid on between every sip, I doused myself every single time.

I parked at the Zopkios brake check lot, quickly got dressed and into my boots, then stepped in a pile of dog poop that had been hidden by a centimetre of snow. I didn’t notice at first, and my next step was into my bindings. Most of the poop had stayed on my foot and was transported to the bindings. It squished through my binding and oozed out the sides. The springs were filled with dog poop. The bolt heads were filled with dog poop. The cavities in the locking lever were filled with dog poop. I decided that I didn’t like this and spent a while mashing snow into the binding in hopes that it would clear out. It did not, so I took a picture and called that good enough.

Dog Poop Mash

Zupjok went like a dream. It was firm, but with just enough fresh snow that traction was still pretty good. There was one icy section where I wanted to put on ski crampons but couldn’t, because the slot was jammed with frozen dog poop, but it didn’t take long to just boot-pack up it. It took 1:15 from car to summit, and I started to get optimistic that I was going to succeed.

Top of Zupjok

Getting to Llama and Alpaca was straightforward, although visibility wasn’t the greatest. The ridges were corniced to the max. There was a skin track along the cornices, about 10 metres from the edge. I think that the person who made the track was likely aware of the cornices and trying to keep a safe distance, but they were definitely on cornice the whole way; there was a deep crack where the cornices were separating from the rock, filled with light, blown snow, and the skin track was on the wrong side.

Cornices everywhere

I’d been hoping to find a way down to the ridge between Vicuña and Alpaca, but it was not to be. Everywhere I could see was too steep to hold snow, and most of it I couldn’t see because of the cornices. The next peak along was Bighorn, which would have been easy to get off of, and the ridge to Bighorn wasn’t steep at all, but there was a ton of windswept, smooth, icy rock. The only descent that looked snow-continuous to the bottom was the cornice. During this scouting mission I had to take my skis off repeatedly to get over bare rock, and I really started to get irritated with the dog poop. I started thinking about pouring boiling water over it. Would it come out clean and sparkling, like it had been through a dishwasher, or would it just get stinkier and stickier?

No good way down to the ridge leading to Vicuña

Ridge line from Alpaca to Bighorn

Ridge line from Alpaca to Bighorn, from the other side. Not so steep, but too bare and icy to get to safely get across

I went back to Alpaca and intentionally plopped off a small cornice. Bare cliffs in the direction I wanted to go forced me to near the valley bottom and away from Vicuña. I ended up in a pile of avalanche debris and decided that I could multitask by eating lunch and boiling water to attack the dog poop. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the boiling water worked; the poop melted away, and even places like the Torx screw heads were sparkling after a few seconds. All that was left of the dog poop was a nasty slot melted into the snow.

Dog poop iced cap

The sun came out. Until then, I felt like I was cranked to 11, but with a thin layer of uselessly soft shmoo on a hard crust, traction became an issue, and I slowed right down. Vicuña is steep, and I had been hoping that the chain handline would be exposed, or that it’d be snow-continuous along the ridge, but it was patchy and icy. Because I am lazy and weak, I told myself that I was not doing Vicuña because of the sketchy conditions.

Nice view and a disgusting up track

Vicuña

Despite bailing on Vicuña, it was 4:00 by the time I was up and down Guacano. The first half of the ski down Guacano was fast and joyous, but the second half had been logged about twenty years ago and was now a tangled fiasco. Once I got to the valley bottom, I hurried over to Zum but had a struggle because of a steep ascent with shmoo-on-ice conditions, and being yet lazier and weaker than I was a couple hours ago when I bailed on Vicuña.

View from Guanaco, with Vicuña in the foreground

Typical skiing on the bottom half of Guanaco

From left to right, Alpaca, Vicuña, and Guanaco as seen from Zum

If I’d had any sense, I would have skied back down Zum the way I came up, but I didn’t want to do that because that wouldn’t be interesting and would put my maximally far from Zoa. I ended up in this steep, north-facing powder-bowl, and it was amazing. Then I was in a crust-valley, and it was not amazing. Then I was in a cliff-sided slot filled with refrozen avalanche debris, and it was back to being amazing, but in a different way. I was very tentative on the way down, feeling that I was going to get cliffed-out, but I managed to keep the skis on all the way to the bottom. The ski down took me an hour, and it’s only 600 metres, which meant I had been going up Zupjok faster than I was coming down Zum. Disturbing.

Descent from Zum

This put me on Coldwater Road, which I’d intended to ski along to Zoa, and then to Zopkios from the Zoa ridge. Darkness was falling, the trees between me and Zoa looked annoying, and doing the Zopkios ridge in the middle of the night seemed like a bad idea, so I just resigned myself to 11 boring kilometres of plodding down Coldwater to the pipeline cut and following it back to the Zopkios brake check.

The next morning my wife pointed out that the gasket for my travel mug had fallen out in the drying rack. This explained why all my earlier attempts to close the lid properly failed.