Groundhog Day and Garibaldi Lake

Participants: Nadine Bruneau, Oliver Capko, the legendary Christian Veenstra

Back when we were replacing the roof on the Brian Waddington Hut, we had a bunch of VOC volunteers, who were there for the weekends, Jacob, who stayed the whole time, and Nadine, who wasn’t even a VOCer, but still stayed a full week and got a disproportionate amount of work done. I’d promised to take her backcountry skiing if she ever wanted to. I meant it when I said it, but I didn’t really expect that she’d come back and request it when winter hit.

Oliver and Nadine (Photo:Oliver)

We initially decided to go to Waddington Hut, but there was a stag party registered for the hut that weekend, so I suggested Burton Hut, which meant crossing Garibaldi Lake. Nadine had expressed concern about the ice, but I assured her that it’d be fine, and that if anyone was going to go through the ice, it’d be me. There are two claims in that statement, and one out of two is a pass, I guess.

Friday started out pretty good. It was Groundhog Day, and I was feeling vindicated. Before my wife, Iva, had completely come around to the wisdom of buying a large inflatable groundhog, I was insisting that she’d be happy and find it worth it when she heard Groundhog carollers outside. I’d said that a few times, enough that she’d totally remember me saying it, and on Friday, while I was at work, I started getting messages showing that the Groundhog carollers had really come.

Why wouldn’t carollers come?

I met Nadine and her friend Oliver at my house, and we all loaded up into my vehicle and headed out Friday after work. As I left, Iva told me to “stay safe” and I said “that’s my specialty.”

During the car ride up, there was some discussion about running out of batteries for headlamps, and I said that I had three just in case. I ended up telling the story of a terrible, headlampless crawl to Harrison Hut, feeling for Veenstra’s tracks to guide me in the pitch darkness. That’s too long of a story to work into this trip report, but I’ll share one key bit: I was dead-tired going into the weekend because I’d been designing and welding to do bridge repair, for a few days, and had only a few hours sleep over those days. I’d been welding all Friday night into Saturday morning, and Veenstra picked me up from work just as I finished, without a wink of sleep. I dozed off immediately in the car, but my phone rang. This didn’t wake me up, but Veenstra rooting around in my pocket trying to get my phone did, and I didn’t fall back asleep after that.

Nadine and Oliver were taken aback by the invasion of my pocket. I assured them that Veenstra didn’t grasp the inappropriateness of that move, which made it easier to look the other way, and that his admirable qualities outweighed stuff like that by a huge margin.

The trip up to Garibaldi Lake had more walking and less skiing than we would have liked, but it wasn’t too terribly late when we got to the campground, where one would normally start skiing across the lake.

Nadine and me nearing the campground (photo: Oliver)

The ice conditions were fairly suboptimal. The lake had risen with all the recent melting, which floated up the ice, leaving a gap between the shore and thicker ice. The gap between the good ice and the shore had partially frozen, but not enough that we could find a good place to cross in the dark. We ended up bivvying in the cooking shelter, which was fine because there weren’t any campers.

This was from Sunday, but it shows the condition of the ice near the shore. The melted out area is where water enters the creek; there’s usually at least some sort of open spot there (photo:Nadine)

The next morning, the near shore ice had set up enough that we could easily get to the thicker ice. With some effort, I punched my pole through the edge of the new ice, and hooked my basket under the old ice to get a thickness measurement. It was 8″ which is plenty.

For most of the lake crossing, it was totally solid. Every now and then, there’d be a place where the ice felt really thin, but I could always stick my pole through the top crust, the slush that hadn’t frozen below it, and then hit the solid thick ice underneath.

Even fairly near the hut, the ice seemed good. The picture is looking right towards Garibaldi, and the hut is close. (Photo: Oliver)

When we got quite near the hut, Oliver had a soft spot under one foot. I told him that he should poke his pole through and find the good ice. He stuck his pole in and it just went straight down. This was really disturbing, and we turned back. It’d been squishy for a while, but on every previous check, there was good ice underneath. Now we didn’t know where the boundary between crust-on-slush with good ice underneath and crust-on-slush with nothing underneath was.

We ended up on a track of snowless ice; for a while I thought it was where a crack had allowed the snow to get soaked. Later, it became clear that it was a skin track. Either way, it was much more solid. Oliver pointed out that without snow on it, it wouldn’t be insulated and would freeze faster.

I said that we could go along it, probing all the way, and if it was solid to the shore, then great, but otherwise we’d turn around, and that I’d take responsibility for this fiasco and go first.

We got tantalizingly close, but the track ended offshore. All the previous decisions we made were not particularly risk-averse, but in retrospect, I can still see where I was coming from. Going back on my statement that we’d turn around unless it was totally solid because we were really close is indefensible, but that’s what I did. I at least made sure that the others were a ways back, and unclipped my waist belts and sternum strap in case I had to quickly get out of my pack.

I was probing a lot, and it was really not great, but not seemingly worse than what it was a few steps back. All of a sudden, cracks emanated from my feet and in a fraction of a second were four feet long. A circular crack appeared, connecting all the tips of the radial cracks and I sank.

I distinctly remember a few simultaneous not happy emotions as I went in. I felt really guilty and regretful. I’d messed things up and botched the trip. Nadine and Oliver were for sure really disturbed now. I was disturbed my pack was going to be really wet very soon, and worried that it might sink if it got completely filled with water. I also had this “what a pain in the ass” feeling. Maybe if I was less dumb I would have been worried about whether I was going to be okay, but that just wasn’t one of the emotions.

The first priority was to get the pack out of the water before it totally filled up and sank. I got out of it and heaved it up, but it broke through the ice. After a couple attempts, it was clear that I’d need to do something else.

I threw my sunglasses towards shore. I’d eventually lose them swimming around, and I could always collect them after I sorted myself out.

Next step was to get my skis off and thrown onto ice far enough away from me that they wouldn’t sink. I reached down for my left, and it wasn’t there. Crap. I tried my right, and it wasn’t there either. I didn’t feel it happen, but I must have kicked them off treading water.

I thought about swimming down to get them, but it was really dark down there, with most of the light being reflected off the snowy ice and not getting into the water. I couldn’t make it down very far wearing clothes and ski boots, and I didn’t want to try to take them off while my pack was sinking, so I wrote the skis off.

I took my poles off my wrists and grabbed them near the baskets and planted the points into the ice, tried to lift myself up, and the ice broke.

I looked back and saw Oliver coming towards me. I assured him that things were 100% under control and that he should stay waaaay back because it’s a lot easier to deal with one person in the drink than two.

I’d spent enough time not accomplishing anything. Bottom line is the distance from me to the shore was shorter than Browning Lake, the little dinky one by the highway in Murrin Park, and I’d swam it end-to-end with an inch of ice on it. If I just went for it, I’d either swim to the shore or meet ice I couldn’t break, and if that happened, I could get up on the ice.

Crossing Browning Lake back in 2008 (Photo: Pete Hudson)

Giving the ice a firm elbow from above would break it, so I kicked myself along, elbowing through the ice until it started to feel a little firmer. I swam back to my pack and pulled it to where I ment the firmer ice, planted the poles and tried to get up on the ice. This time I got my torso on top and was mid-process of getting a leg up before the ice broke. That’s progress, I guess. I repeated the process of elbow-smashing my way forwards, swimming back to get my pack, and trying to heave myself up a bunch of times. I was consistently getting a leg up, but breaking through again before I could get the other up.

An elbow a few days later (photo: Iva Cheung)

At one point, I tried to pull myself up, just to test it, without bothering to swim back for the pack. That time I made it out, but now I couldn’t directly reach my pack. To keep my weight spread out on the ice, I rolled parallel to the elongated hole I made until I could snag the pack with a pole, then pushed it along to where I got out, and wrestled it out with my poles while staying as far back from the open water as I could.

I’d broken ice past where I’d thrown my sunglasses to, so I tried to roll back and get my sunglasses, but it had too much give. I decided the ice could keep the glasses.

From there I rolled towards shore, dragging my pack, until it felt solid enough that I could crawl.

Once I was on shore, Oliver called out and asked what the plan was. I told him that I’d work on that once I’d dumped all the water out of the pack; not all the contents were saturated yet, and I wanted to keep it that way.

This makes it look shorter than it really was, but if you look at the size of the ski track entering the hole versus my feet, you get the scale. You can see the sunglasses to the right of the hole. (Photo: Oliver)

Oliver probed around for some potential different routes to shore and didn’t find any.

Nadine asked if I’d fallen through the ice before. I told her I hadn’t.

“Well it sure looked like you knew what you were doing.”

I felt that was a fascinating statement. One who falls through the ice clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Oliver asked me how the water was, and I told him that it was warm once you got used to it. By this point the contents of my pack were spread out over the snow, and I was wringing out clothes, so there wasn’t any kind of hurry. Nadine and Oliver started having lunch while we talked about what to do.

I sent Nadine a message from my inReach, so she would have a way of communicating once she got into cell range, and then I told them to just go back across the lake, since all the ice we’d crossed previously was far less dangerous than the bit between them and the shore. They might as well have fun and do some skiing, because them not having fun wasn’t going to make my situation any better. I’d get myself organized and then post-hole over Polemonium Ridge and Gentian Pass to get to Taylor Meadows. Where I was standing, the snow was crusty enough that I wasn’t breaking through.

Nadine and Oliver started heading back, and I felt steadily better as they got further away, onto progressively more solid ice. I started heading up the valley, to where the creek was shallower, and realized that I had a bigger problem than I thought I did. I was punching through the crust altogether too often, and going a long way down. The crust was too thick to push through, so in some sections I had to crawl to stay on top. With a water-logged overnight pack, going up the steep Polemonium Ridge and Gentian Pass just wouldn’t work.

I realized I was doing things in the wrong order. I’d have plenty of time to think while stuff dried, but not plenty of time to dry stuff if I just stood around thinking. I got to the hut and threw some clothes onto the crest of the roof so that they could dry a bit in the sunlight, and hung everything else up inside the hut so that some of the water could drip out. There’s no wood stove in the hut, which makes drying stuff more of a challenge.

I spent a while stomping a good trail from the hut to the outhouse and from the hut to the creek, such that I could walk easily between them. I then post-holed and crawled over to the start of Polemonium ridge to see what the snow was like in the forest. More walkable, some bare patches, but still lots of sinking. It was bad, but definitely better than in the open alpine. Could I sidehill in the forest along the Panorama Ridge side of the lake? Probably not, as it’s steep everywhere and occasionally cliffy.

Maybe I could cut branches and make snowshoes. I had a few Voile straps. Maybe that was a dumb idea.

Was I really going to have to call SAR after all? I sure didn’t want to be responsible for wasting their time and $10,000 in helicopter costs. If Veenstra were here, he’d find a way out. What would he do? He’d probably send me an inReach message and expect me to deal with it.

Obviously the thing to do was to just send Veenstra a message and expect him to deal with it.

At this point, the astute reader recognizes that the discussion of Veenstra in the car with Nadine and Oliver was ham-handed foreshadowing. In my defence, I wasn’t aware what was going to happen when we had that conversation.

The inReach is entirely waterproof, but my phone and transceiver were entirely waterlogged.

Soggy transceiver

The inReach is really meant to be paired with a phone, and when it is, sending and receiving messages is as easy as texting. With no phone, though, it’s a major effort. All four buttons require a hard push to get them to work, and you select letters with the up/down buttons. Entering “it” means arrowing to “i”, pressing enter, eleven presses of the down arrow, then another enter.

There’s no physical horizontal arrow buttons. To edit something, you need to scroll up above the alphabet with the vertical arrows buttons and find horizontal arrow icons.

Punctuation is in a different menu, and numbers are in yet another menu. Further, if you get an incoming message while you’re writing, you lose everything you wrote, so when Veenstra and Iva were asking for clarification on what skis they should be bringing, I was really struggling to get any information out to them. It took a few hours to work though what would have been a couple minutes if I had a phone.

After standing around outside the hut for a few hours inReaching, I spent the rest of the daylight putting on wet clothes and running up and down the outhouse path to cook the water out of them.

That evening, I could see the headlamps at the other end of the lake. Although it was obvious that Nadine and Oliver were going to be fine–they were several kilometers into solid ice before I lost sight of them–seeing the confirmation that they were on the other side made me feel less guilty.

Oliver was going to make tacos for all of us Saturday night. The tacos were of course still with him, so I postponed lunch till after dark. The top bagel was very waterlogged, but the subsequent bagels weren’t too bad.

I put on as much wet stuff as I could without making the sleeping bag get soggy and went to bed, expecting to wake up in the morning wearing dry clothes.

Instead, I woke to a sudden drop and a bang. What the hell was that? Did I dream that? Was it thermal contraction stresses relieving themselves? Was something breaking in the hut?

I’d almost decided to not worry about it when I heard this terrible sound, kind of like fabric ripping, but without the regular spacing of the yarns snappings. It was kind of reminiscent of what it sounds like when the marmots are tearing apart the hut plywood from underneath, but it was too continuous. If it was a marmot, it had a four-foot reach.

BANG!

A shock went through my feet, and my body suddenly dropped a few millimeters. I didn’t feel quite level anymore. Was the sleeping loft I was in collapsing? Was the whole hut coming down? Or was it some transient thing that was now done?

Clearly it wasn’t done, but the terrible ripping/marmot noise came back.

Roland with marmotted plywood pulled from under Harrison hut

Marmot caught in the act of destroying the outhouse at Harrison Hut.

BANG!

I dropped again, and it seemed like more than last time. My feet really were kicked up quite high this time. It now seemed certain that there was some sort of progressive failure going on. During the day, it didn’t really seem like there was a single point of failure that could let go and cause the hut or even a floor of the hut to drop out, but the night disagreed. The terrible sound came back.

BANG!

The drop was bigger, the shock at my feet was huge, and I was distinctly not level. I had no idea what was coming apart, but I had to get up and save the hut.

“No one cares about structural failure, but were there really Groundhog carollers?” you say.

Yes. Yes, there sure were, and they were glorious.

Iva and Scott figured it out eventually. You may recognize some prominent VOCers.

Back to the hut, as I got up, it became obvious what was breaking. It was just the baffles in my sleeping mat, which were already in bad shape, separating completely. Every time one would rip out, I’d feel a pop under my feet and my body would drop. I felt kind of ridiculous for being outwitted by a sleeping mat and went to sleep.

My treacherous sleeping mat (photo: Iva Cheung)

In the morning, I got up and checked my inReach. Veenstra was already rocketing up. I felt pretty good about getting all of my remaining clothes dried by the time he arrived, except for my gloves, which were still very waterlogged.

Around 10:00, I heard what sounded like either a helicopter or a Cessna in the distance. I had this “that better not be for me” thought, but it got nowhere close, so I didn’t think much more about it.

I filled two Nalgenes with boiling water, put my gloves on top, and wrapped my sleeping bag loosely over top, making sure that there was a vent on the top. Soon steam was coming out of the cone, and the gloves were actually drying. I wish I’d thought of that last night, because I likely didn’t have enough time to get them completely dry before Veenstra arrived.

At noon, I heard a muffled thud. I opened the door and Veenstra had arrived and managed to fall over in front of the hut, after making it down some nasty stuff on Gentian without bailing.

My phone was filled with water, so this is a picture of Veenstra from a different trip. He was less frosty this time

He informed me that a window in my car had been smashed. Despite that not being the greatest news, it didn’t really change our path forward.

I had all my stuff spread out for drying, so it took a while to get packed out. My boot liners were frozen onto the floor solidly enough that they took some paint off when I broke them free.

As we got going, I realised that I had some binding problems. I tend to bend the toe pins of bindings out. Usually it happens when I have to stomp into a hard crust to get traction when skinning. Once the toe pins are bent, it gets progressively easier to twist out of the ski while in touring mode. I must have done it at the end of the last trip and not noticed then.

Both skis came off a couple times while I was in walk mode, without an undue amount of for being applied to them. The fourth time, I pulled up the toe lever extra hard, and it went way too far–basically upside down.

Unbeknownst to us, someone else had fallen through the ice near the campground, and had called Squamish Search and Rescue (SSAR). The first thing I’d heard, around 10:00, was the SSAR helicopter assisting that individual.

Unfortunately for us, the SSAR helicopter came back a few hours later to take pictures of the lake. I heard helicoptery noises again, but this time they kept on getting closer and closer. It landed at the hut. I’d had good views across the lake all day; I knew for sure that the only people anywhere near the hut were Veenstra and myself. Did someone call us in? As tempting as it was to just keep going and not deal with it, we both knew that we shouldn’t let SSAR go on a goose chase, so it was time to hurry back to the hut.

I tried to turn around, and my binding popped off again. I couldn’t get the toe lever back into the proper position by hand, so I gave it a very light kick with my foot, and it broke off.

Both bindings are spread too wide, and one toe lever is busted (photo: Iva)

Veenstra hadn’t waited for me and was on the moraine ridge near the hut as the helicopter took off again. It went up the valley, turned around, flew right overtop of Veenstra and headed back across the lake and over the horizon.

What the hell was that? Veenstra speculated that maybe someone else made it to the hut and called in SSAR in the 15 minutes between when we left the hut and the helicopter arrived. That was way too fast, and I knew for sure that no one had crossed the lake that morning. Were they called in for us? If so, they really didn’t do much searching for a search and rescue operation. They didn’t just touch down at the hut; they spun down the rotor, which is something that normally only happens if people are getting in and out.

Whatever. I concluded that it probably was for me, which I was quite unhappy about, but that we’d really done our best to do the right thing and make contact. I’d also done my best to make Nadine and Oliver understand that I could call SSAR if needed, so they shouldn’t.

Veenstra and I were still mystified by what happened with SSAR until Oliver got in contact with them a couple days later.

We turned our attention back to the bindings. We didn’t have a lot of daylight left, we had about sixteen kilometers to do, and the first half had enough microterrain to both take a while and not be the kind of thing one would want to do in the dark. We’d definitely jumped the shark.

We got a couple multitools and a screwdriver involved and managed to get the remains of the toe lever back to where it was supposed to go. Both sides moved independently, but it was sort of functional. Veenstra had the good idea of trading skis for the uphill. He’s a lot lighter than I am, so he was far less likely to pop out of semi-functional bindings than me. Going up Polemonium Ridge involved a lot of transitions between skinning and carrying skis as the snow coverage was maximally annoying: too much and not enough. Making a bunch of transitions with a broken toe lever somewhat worse, the torsion spring was kind of mangled, and the end of it stuck straight up and stabbed Veenstra’s hand during the transitions.

The ski trade worked out well until we had to climb Gentian Ridge. It was an icy sidehill, with a bit of new snow, that I’d have had no problem with in my skis, but the Veenstra skis were too thin for my size, had totally wrecked edges, and skins that were both worn out and too narrow. If I followed Veenstra’s track as it was, the light track he’d made in the new snow would separate from the crust and I’d be leaning into my pole to self-arrest. I could only make progress by breaking through the crust, which took three or four stomps for every step. Veenstra got cold waiting and my legs were burning by the time we’d finished.

Me stomping my way up (photo: Veenstra)

We traded skis back again for the descent, since Veenstra’s skis are telelmark, and my descent was disturbing. It would have been a blue run, and the snow was good, but my bindings had degraded to the point of being rattly. Every turn had a clonk-clonk and they felt like they were about to come off, so straight-lined whatever I could and kept turns as far-between as possible on the steeper bits.

I clearly wasn’t thinking about the conditions of my bindings when getting ready for the descent (photo: Veenstra)

By the time we’d skinned across Taylor Meadows to the campground, my legs had gotten over the stomping and Veenstra’s feet had turned to stew. Veenstra’s day was about 32 km, which is a lot for most, but less than a third of his longest day trips. The combination of him being in his rock ski boots, there being more walking, more sidestepping, more laborious trailbreaking, him carrying a second set of skis and boots in, him helping carry some of my stuff out all added up to him being somewhat hobbled on the way out.

When we got to the parking lot, we discovered that Veenstra’s truck had been broken into as well. That was a separate crime spree from where my window was smashed, because my window was already broken when Veenstra arrived.

Temporary repair. One might conclude from the cat litter bag that I have a cat, but it’s actually for the guinea pigs, Princess Rumblestrut and Countess von Popcorn.

I didn’t really have anything of value in the car, but they took my jumper cables, jeans, belt, shoes and hoodie. The hoodie used to belong to a friend’s adult son, who died by suicide. After the death, my friend had given it to me and told me that he wanted me to have it, so I was much more bummed about it than the window, even though the window is going to cost a lot more to replace.

I got home fairly late and started getting stuff hung up to dry, and Iva went to bed, but not without firing my words from Friday night back at me:

Fair enough. I’m not really in a position to argue with that.

My phone was definitely not going to work filled with water, and was close enough to sealed that it wasn’t going to dry, so I chucked it in the air fryer to get the water out. It’s still bricked, but I very much doubt I made anything worse.

I wasn’t feeling very positive about people, but then I got sent a picture from another VOC expedition to my groundhog, and was sent a Groundhog Day card from people I don’t even know in Massachusetts, which really helped.

(photo: Iva)

(photo: Iva)

Elizabeth Chu and Peach Trippell (photo: Peach)