New Years at Phelix: Or, My First Real VOC Trip

Dec 29 2023, 11:30pm. I couldn’t sleep.  I was worried about the weight of my bag. It was my first time backpacking overnight and I’m a horrible, horrible packer. Do I really need about three meals worth of mashed potatoes in a ziploc bag ? Probably not. Will I take it anyway? Yes I will. Oh wow, here’s a 2kg parka that takes up almost as much space in my pack as my synthetic sleeping bag—I better take that! I somehow convinced myself it was all a problem for tomorrow and went to sleep.

Day 1:

Tomorrow came fast. I woke up at 4am, got ready, and carrying a pack that felt heavier by the second, ran downstairs at 5:10 (a minute before Anton’s algorithmically chosen pickup time). He arrived about 10 minutes later, which was a lot speedier than I expected. Unfortunately, this wasn’t fast enough to save me the embarrassment of accidentally attempting to break into somebody else’s car in my sleep deprived state as they ran out yelling “I AM NOT AN UBER! I AM NOT AN UBER!”.

The drive to Pemberton went by quickly, and after a short stop at McDonalds, we made good time to the Forest Service Road. This is where things started getting dicey. The FSR was covered in horribly thick ice, and even Anton’s 4X4 struggled to maintain traction, after an “ego-check” (his words) spin-out, we stopped and put on snow chains at kilometre 6.

We saw many cars pass us by, each one more ridiculous than the last, starting with a Ford pickup, and ending with an Evo with no chains whose movements mimicked those of a 5 year old on a slip ‘n slide. We drove back to kilometer 2 on somewhat dubious information to make sure that no cars had gotten stuck, and were the last ones to the lower parking lot, sometime around 10:15am.

Anton was determined not to attempt driving up to the upper parking lot. The road was far too icy. However, others did not share his apprehension, and powered through to the first bridge, generously ferrying stragglers and their bags (including mine). By this time I’d fallen way behind, and was the last person in the group. Nadia, who was sweeping, generously walked me to the bridge where the rest of the slower ones waited. I had an enlightening conversation with her, learning the difference between down and synthetics and that all my gear was in fact the latter. A fact that would come to haunt my back over the next three days.

After trudging over the ice on the FSR we regrouped at the first bridge, which was pretty much the furthest up that was still drivable, and began making our way to the upper parking lot. The terrain was a lot nicer in this section, with a thin layer of compacted snow making it easier (relatively) to skin up and snowshoe on, as opposed to the iced over mud and just normal mud that were the trail so far. Unfortunately, the freezing level seemed to have risen over the day, and there was a light drizzle the entire way up this section.

We reached the second bridge around 2pm, had a quick lunch (one of three turkey sandwiches) and kept walking up towards the main trailhead. This is where I got my first view of Mount Taillefer (or at least one of its southern subpeaks), and it was a spectacular sight: rocky, snowy, and looming massive over our route. It made the slog so far seem almost worth it. I already felt exhausted, and everybody else was telling me we hadn’t even gotten to the hard part yet.

The western bank of Phelix Creek was a nice, undulating walk on thick compacted snow with a slight incline, all under the shadow of Mount Taillefer. The weather had somewhat cleared (at least it wasn’t raining) giving everything a beautiful golden sheen. It was skinnable, although there were countless little stream crossings that couldn’t be crossed on skis, causing little traffic jams on the narrow skin track.

Mount Taillefer

We reached the bottom of the forest section around 330pm. By this time, I’d begun to hear murmurs of “slog” and “sufferfest” around me. I was feeling pretty good about myself though, it was still an hour before sunset, and with the naive optimism of somebody who has never been to Phelix before I really believed that it couldn’t be all that far, and since this was the last section anyway, we’d have to be at the hut by a little after sunset.

The hard part:

I had no idea how wrong I was.

It was a little over 20 minutes into the forest, when I realized that I couldn’t see the sun anymore, nor anybody from our little group that held up the rear. The “steeps” seemed to have exacerbated our speed differences, with faster people rocketing up the hill, while the slower ones or those with heavier packs lagged behind. I found myself right between both of these groups, and the idea of hiking long hours carrying a just-a-little-too-heavy pack in an unfamiliar forest in the darkness became all too worryingly real. I decided I’d wait at the first boulder field until somebody behind me passed by, and I’d hike along with them.

About 10 minutes later, I saw Sri (or more specifically I saw Sri’s skis forming an upside down V on his backpack) under me, I called out to him, got a response, and started hiking up again. 40 minutes of very slow slogging over slippery snow later I’d begun to realize it was becoming pitch black. It had also started raining again. I’ve never been out in the wild in the dark before, and it’s always been something I’ve been taught to avoid at all costs. “Hurry up! We have to get there before dark!”, “Turn around at 2pm at any cost”, were the words that dictated being outdoors when I was younger.

Yet here I was in mountains far, far away from home, in pitch black darkness in an unfamiliar forest, and the only way left to go was up. Soon the rain turned to snow, and the trail disappeared under a mass of fresh powder. I felt like with every other step Sri’s or my legs would sink knee deep in the snow. My body ached, this was the latest I’d ever been, the longest I’d ever hiked, and by far the heaviest I’d ever carried. I was hungry but it was too cold to stop. I was thirsty but out of water. Then there was a point where I just stopped feeling. The beautiful thing about hiking in the night in the snow is that the world narrows down to only what’s immediately ahead of you and lit up by your headlight. The snow seems to absorb all sound, and all you can hear is the crunch of your boots under you. It’s easy to pretend nothing else exists. I felt like I’d pushed myself to my limit, and beyond it was just blankness. My body stopped whining, and Sri and I slowly but surely made our way up the snowy switchbacks and found ourselves at the top.

Sri takes a break

The hut was not visible. Snow was falling heavily and it became impossible to see further than a few meters ahead. The skin-tracks had been buried, and Sri generously took the responsibility of breaking trail. There was nobody ahead of us, and nobody behind us for quite a while, and it felt like we were walking through an arctic wasteland (at least by my tropical, barely-seen-snow-before standards).

We spotted the light of headlamps in the distance, in the ballpark of where Sri guessed the hut should be. After circling around a few times looking for the right trail, we eventually made it to the hut at 8pm after a gruelling ten hour day. Almost all the sleeping spots were taken, leaving just the benches and the ground floor (for those brave/desperate enough to fight off the mice). It seemed all was lost until Adam generously gave me his spot in the attic—he’d had enough of the crowded hut and decided to camp outside. I took out the kilogram of mashed potatoes I made the day before , had a few bites, and promptly passed out in the attic in a little corner with no leg space. It didn’t matter, the worst was over and I could finally get some sleep.

Day 2:

I woke up the next day at 8am to legs that couldn’t move. After 10 minutes of staring at my feet, trying to get them to obey my will like in that one scene from Kill Bill, I managed to recover enough motor ability to crawl out of the attic and make a controlled descent (read: fall) down the ladder.

I was told that the only way to get over the soreness was to keep moving, and I followed diligently. While the skiers spent the day skiing laps on Mount Frodo and Cabin Hill, the snowshoers (about 10 of us) took a leisurely stroll to the upper lake. Once there, the few in our group who’d completed their AST quickly surveyed the conditions, decided it was a little risky to continue up towards Mount Frodo, especially with the amount of non-AST’ed people in the group. We followed obediently and circled back around the bunny hill and made to return to the cabin. The entire valley was covered in a layer of wispy fog, that only let us catch the shortest glimpses of Mount Gandalf’s snowy white peak looming over us.

Robin, Gabriel, Odette, Julia and I wanted to do some beacon practice instead of returning to the hut, so Gabriel and Julia (being the only ones that had done their AST) kindly showed us some basics. The morbid radio powered treasure hunt made the horrific prospect of saving my friends in a natural disaster almost seem like a fun time.

We returned to the hut at 1pm for lunch. I discovered to my horror that my sandwiches had turned into a homogenous turkey, cheese, and tomato flavoured pulp that had seemingly been through a dozen freeze-thaw cycles. I was now down to my reserves of emergency ramen which I’d packed in my bag with uncharacteristic prescience and however much of my ridiculously heavy mashed potatoes I could ration out over the rest of the weekend.

Robin, Julia, Odette, Rehaan and I left the hut at 3:30pm to have a spot of tea somewhere scenic. We climbed ten minutes up the little hill immediately north of the hut, and although Robin’s stove struggled in the cold wind, we were able to enjoy a cup of earl grey. We watched some of the snowshoers build a quinzee and the skiers come as small dots gradually growing, down Cabin Hill and returning to the hut

The hut on a foggy day

We got back to the hut around 5:30pm, and the festivities had just started to light up, as over the next few hours the slow trickle of boxed wine filled the hut with a jovial mood. Joemar found the hut guitar and he, Odette, and I took turns on it while happy and inebriated VOC’ers sang along to classics from the songbook.

Matt, god bless his soul, made some of the best mulled wine I’ve ever had using nothing but a snow-melting pot missing a lid, Anton’s mystery spice, and the hut’s wood stove.

Champagne was popped a little past midnight out in the snow, and the revelries continued on well towards two in the morning, although many had gone to sleep earlier, seeing as we had a clear get-the-eff-out time of 9am, which Anton intended to enforce strictly.

I fell violently asleep at 2am, fully dressed, somewhere in the general vicinity of my sleeping bag.

Day 3:

Almost everyone woke up at 7:30am on the dot, and within the next two minutes had packed up and rolled their bags and mats. I was surprised at the almost martial speed with which everyone moved. I walked downstairs and out to brush my teeth and was greeted by probably one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. The fog that was all we could see for the last two days had cleared. The sky was blue, and all of a sudden I had a spectacular realization of where I was standing, in the middle of a huge, pristine, gorgeous mountain bowl.

A clear New Year’s morning

Everyone took turns marvelling at the mountains, and from inside the hut you could hear (in regular intervals) the opening and shutting of the main door followed by a multitude of muffled “holy shit”s.

After a quick and uneventful breakfast of ramen on a borrowed stove (interrupted only by the “woah”s of people walking outside for the first time today), Gabriel and I descended together. The trail was entirely iced over, and it was here that I realized that only one of the snowshoes I’d rented had working crampons, which made for an interesting walk down. I took a few falls before I eventually got the hang of moving on ice with one working shoe. We stopped and had some snacks at the trailhead around 1pm (I really think Snickers are the most efficient calorie delivery system we have—fight me). Duncan generously shared some sausages with the rest of the small group (Charles, Gabriel, Odette, Julia, and Lucas), before we hastily made for the lower parking lot. Everyone was a little tired of hiking by this point.

Near the car park

We got there at about 2:30pm and the cars trickled out one by one. Faisal showed up half an hour later and got breathtaking shots of the valley on his drone. Nadia and Anton arrived an hour after that and off we went back to the city.

I spent all the car ride back in a daze. This was, without a doubt, one of the most difficult and intense things I’ve ever done, but it also feels like the only thing I’ve ever done that was really, and I mean really, worth doing. How could I possibly go back to regular life knowing what was out there? I felt like my brain chemistry had permanently changed.

It’s the end of January as I’m writing this, and I’ve been on a trip nearly every weekend since. I think joining the VOC might’ve been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I can’t wait to see where it takes me next.

Phelix looking back from across the lake

Happy New Years !