The VOC gets a mix of trip reports ranging from quite impressive to people managing to somehow epic pretty hard on a day trip to Red Heather through a combination of poor planning, taking too much junk, and being softer than they thought they were. What makes the VOC great is that there’s lots of support and non-judgemental advice for the beginners from everyone, including those that are doing the hard trips.
With that, here’s me getting my ass handed to me on a Red Heather day trip.
Skipping through the on-trail and lazy glacier stuff, I arrived at the Neve Hilton just before noon. In the 70s, the VOC built the Neve Hilton, a poorly placed hut east of Mt. Garibaldi, that even after a dedicated shovelling-out effort for a few years, was crushed by snow. I’ve been to the remains a couple times before but this was my first encounter with the remains of the outhouse. Not surprisingly, it’s quite close to the hut, but it’s behind a bit of a ridge which hides it from sight, at least in its collapsed state.
Crushed remains of the Neve Hilton outhouse
Things started to go awry after the Hilton. Up until then, it was all bare ice and flat enough that crampons weren’t needed. One leaves the rock that the Hilton is on a couple hundred meters higher than when they left the ice. There was fresh snow blanketing the glacier up after the Hilton, and the ice was substantially steeper and more crevassed. I’d need to wear crampons and probe every step.
Constant probing is slow, but the bigger problem I’d made for myself is that I’d grabbed the wrong crampons. The ones I’d packed weren’t mine, but were the ones Devlin used to use when he was really little, and they didn’t have enough range to fit on my foot properly. My sole was on top of the front rests, my toes were crunched, and the front points were under the balls of my feet. This didn’t feel great, but it was sort of workable, so I kept going.
Probing every step is both slow and tiring for the arms, but it is also absolutely necessary for solo early-season travel. On top of the many times I discovered a hidden crevasse where I was at least suspicious, I also found about ten total surprises.
Crevasses
More crevasses
Closeup of the approach to Garibaldi
It doesn’t take a lot of blowing snow to bridge a good-sized crevasse
Seracs
Past the Shark Fin, I decided to cut to the east of Glacier Pikes and get onto the Phoenix Glacier, in the hopes that I’d be able to cross into Sphinx Bay between Sphinx and Deception peaks without dropping a bunch of elevation. This didn’t work out, as the top of the col looked like it might not go, I didn’t want to confirm that as it got dark. I ended up going down to not too far above lake level and then up between Guard and Deception. The first bit of this was at a fairly nasty angle, steeper than the angle of repose, formed when the glacier undercuts a slope made from consolidated till. I’ve never liked being on terrain where everything is loose, and everything that I dislodge bounces to the bottom. It wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the undercut till I’ve been on, though and after about 100 m gain, it rolled off to angle of repose or less.
Coming down the Sphinx Glacier was a bit of an adventure. The ice was smooth and slippery, and it steepened up enough to be somewhat thought-provoking. Self-arresting with poles only probably wouldn’t go so well, and bouncing down until it mellowed out wouldn’t be fun, so I was watching my step. Then all of a sudden one of my undersized crampons separated. The heel-toe adjustment bar disconnected and I was on one foot waving my hands around trying not to tip over.
Nothing was broken. I just put the crampon back together again and hoped that it wouldn’t fall apart again. I feel if it wasn’t plugged into the last hole in the bar, it’d probably not have those problems, but they were substantially too short, even on the last hole. I was a bit jazzed, but made it to the bottom without incident, making cautious, little steps.
In retrospect, it would have probably taken less effort to go lakeside around Guard. I’d heard that it was bad, which is why I was looking to come over a col, but bad is relative.
There’s a significant creek through the middle of Sphinx Bay, and I’ve waded through it a bunch of times, but given that I was a ways up the bay already, I thought I might save time by crossing the creek upstream of the big moraine lake, where it was likely fast and narrow enough that I could just jump from boulder to boulder to get over it. That worked out, but by going that way I’d signed myself up for a major alder thrash. If it wasn’t dark, it would have been an obvious bad choice, but it was dark and I didn’t remember the alder being there. It wasn’t even 9:00 when I entered the alder and despite a full-bodied effort, it took me until midnight to get up to the mound of rock known to the VOC as the Trash Pile. 0.182 km/h, apparently.
The alder thrash
View of the Trash Pile from the hut, with the accursed alder patch below
Once I got to the Burton Hut, I didn’t feel that wiped out, but given that I still had a bunch to do, I was going to need to bivy somewhere, and inside a hut with a catalytic heater seemed like a way better idea than Polemonium Ridge or Helm Glacier. The heater helped for sure, but I hadn’t brought a lot of clothes so I didn’t get much sleep. It gave me time to think about the decisions that got me here.
The previous week, because of an error on my part, when we rebuilt the roof on the hut, we had about a thousand holes in the roof that were still waiting for screws. (Two good trip reports covering the start of the build are here and here.) I’d told everyone at the hut to not worry about that, because I’d be up the next weekend with more screws and would fix it. We all had a fair bit to carry down, and I did my fair share. All of my ratchet straps had been taken by an earlier group taking supplies down, so I had to get a duffle bag, a partially-full jerry can, a generator and my flippers strapped to the outside of my pack with cord. Everyone else had similar challenges, so I shouldn’t complain too much, but about 4 km from the trailhead, something shifted and the pack started listing about 20 degrees to starboard. Since getting in and out of it without a picnic table was a real chore, I tried to compensate by adjusting my straps wonky to the other side, but it only did so much. I didn’t really need to turn my head to see the brain of my pack, and by the time we got to the bottom, I was missing a fair bit of back skin and was feeling lazy and weak.
The pack before things started going awry
At the end of the hike down, I asked Anton for the canoe key, so that I could easily get across Garibaldi Lake to the hut, but we were both tired and managed to forget to make the transfer when he dropped me off at my place. Oh well. I could still find time to get the key during the week, so I emailed some people to see if they wanted to canoe across the lake with me, finish the hut, and maybe get onto Sphinx Glacier too. After getting turned down a few times, my back skin started to feel better and I decided that canoes were lazy and weak and began to hope that none of the other people I’d asked would say yes, so that I’d be able to go around Garibaldi Lake on foot, because that’s what the cool people do.
Going around Garibaldi Lake and finishing the hut as a day trip is realistically as much or more as I could handle, but because I am a really dumb guy, I talked myself up to going across the Neve, finishing the hut, going around the lake, up over Clinker, Brohm Ridge, Cheekye Ridge and back up between Gargoyles and Columnar to rejoin the Red Heather trail at Elfin.
The intended trip
Back at the hut, the day broke with me tired, cold and sore from being curled up on plywood all night. I got all the screws in and remounted the solar panel, finishing at about 2:00 PM. In my mind this was going to be a few hours, but I guess that’s consistent with the pattern of everything taking twice as long as I’d budgeted.
I’d brought six batteries with the impact driver, and I used up a grand total of half of one of them, so five of the batteries in my pack were just for extra exercise. Oh well. The pack still felt much better without the sack of screws and the solar mounting stuff in it.
Hut supplies with too many batteries
Completed hut
Normally when I am going to or from the hut overland, I get in or out of Gentian Pass via the Helm-Gentian Col. I decided to gain a bit of extra elevation but save a km of walking by just going over the Gentian summit. I think this could be faster if, on the descent, I’d scrambled out to my left instead of coming straight down Gentian. I ended up with ice that was steeper than I wanted to deal with in crampons I didn’t trust in front of me, and boxed in on either side by totally loose glacial till, which wasted an hour or two. I was thinking that if I had my skis with me I’d have been happy scraping down, but the nearest pair of skis I had was still at the bottom of Garibaldi Lake as both my attempts at recovery had failed.
From an earlier ski-retrieval attempt
I ran out of daylight as I got to the Panorama Ridge trail. I decided that I was too lazy and weak to make it back to Red Heather on foot and I’d just hike down the switchbacks and bum a ride. I got down at 11:30. Only two people were in the parking lot when I got there. I tried offering them $100 to take me back to the Diamond Head/Red Heather parking lot, but they declined. I kind of suspect that they were too young to drive anyways.
It was becoming clear what the crux of the trip was going to be. Squamish appears to have a bunch of taxi companies to choose between, but I’ve learned from calling all the numbers and asking for a cab that you just get the same dispatcher for all the allegedly different companies, who gets increasingly miffed that keep asking him for a cab when he doesn’t intend to give you one.
This is too dated for any current VOCer, but I’m including it because it makes me laugh. Your parents will understand.
I looked at the Google driving directions and it was 45.9 km. I felt I was too lazy and weak to just walk that, and my feet weren’t happy with the amount of time I’d spent in undersized crampons.
I called Squamish Taxi. I knew for sure that if I asked to be taken up to where I wanted to go, I wasn’t going to get it, because there’s no amount of money you can give them to drive on gravel, so I just asked for a ride from Rubble Creek to Quest University. The dispatch dude told me that they had plenty of in town work to do, so the driver would give me a call when he felt like it, at least 45 minutes. I told the dispatch dude that I’d start walking to keep warm and would advise the driver to my current location when he called, and he said that was cool.
As the kilometres went by, it was becoming clear that the chance of getting a cab was getting vanishingly small. Around Culliton Creek, I decided that while I’d been walking long enough that I was well within my rights to call the taxi again, I didn’t want to give them any money.
By the time I got into town, I was really wanting to sit down for a bit, rest my feet and have some warm food. It was raining, and in the name of fast and light, I didn’t bring any rain pants or a stove, just 1100 screws, a chunk of aluminum angle, and an impact driver and six batteries. As the intention was to do a day trip, I’d just brought snacks and Gatorade powder. That’s totally fine for a day trip, unless the day trip ends up getting into the third day.
Back when we were putting the roof on the Burton hut, we’d been eating off a pre-prepared menu. There were certain things that we had in large quantities. A five-gallon pail of oats, a bunch of Gatorade and eight giant tins of tuna that were 1.88 kg gross weight, 1.25 kg drained, each, for a total of 10 kg drained weight. We didn’t quite get through the oatmeal (although I touched the bottom of the pail while digging out oats on the last day, and missed the Gatorade targets pretty badly, but we did finish the tuna, and I certainly pulled my weight there. Getting through the tuna, half the Gatorade and most of the oats required mixing tuna and Gatorade with almost everything. Anton had dry Gatorade powder on tuna. “It’s good. It tastes like ceviche,” he says. One breakfast Anton was calling everyone to eat with “Tuna-oats!” and he wasn’t bluffing. Of course there was Gatorade oatmeal, known as oatorade, on a few instances. When we got the roof on, we opened up the champagne and to celebrate in the right spirit, I had champaignorade. As our three staples had all been mixed together as binary combinations, I felt I owed it to Anton’s creative spirit to entertain the group by downing a heaping bowl of thick tuna-oatorade. There were no half-measures there, with enough gatorade powder to make a few litres, and a cup-and-half each of tuna and oats. It wasn’t any better than you might be imagining.
Back to plodding along the highway at the outskirts of town, I’d gotten myself in a state where if a tuna-oatorade food truck were to show up and offer $100 for a kilogram, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat.
I was getting splashed by the increasing pre-dawn traffic, so I got off the highway and onto Tantalus Rd. There was this glorious building, with an even more glorious covered entrance. It’s still under construction in the Google photo, and the benches aren’t installed yet, but you’ll have to take my word that there are benches under it now. I sat down, out of the rain, and started looking for a cafe that was open before dawn on Thanksgiving.
I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened them, I was still seated, but the day had broken. My left hand was totally asleep from propping up my head and my phone was still in my right hand. Two ladies were looking at me, fairly concerned. I tried to explain things, but they clearly weren’t Neve types. I offered them $100 to take me up to Red Heather, and they said that they’d love to take the offer, but they had to work. I think they were telling the truth, as opposed to just making an excuse because I was a sketchball, because they had the keys to the commercial area of the building I was in front of, and entered it with a cart filled with janitorial supplies.
Whatever. I decided to walk to the 7/11, get some rolling crap, and crank out the remaining 16 km.
Where I was discovered by the cleaners
Fortunately, there was an Executive Plaza hotel with a restaurant between me and the 7/11. I’d seen the restaurant when I was googling earlier, but it was advertised as an oyster bar, and I couldn’t imagine an oyster bar open early Thanksgiving morning. I hadn’t realized that it was attached to a hotel, though. It was a big place, with fancy tables and fireplaces. I was the only customer there and it took a while to get noticed. The breakfast menu wasn’t oysters. I ordered a bunch of stuff.
The Free Bird, where I ate
“Is someone else coming or do you want that on one plate?”
After a couple breakfasts, all the sugar packets and the little pitcher of cream for the coffee, I was feeling cranked to eleven again and walked to Red Heather. Around the Red Heather chain-up area, I got this amazing series of texts from Squamish Taxi.
Squamish Taxi strikes again
I think it’s pretty bold to ask someone who was outside if they still want a taxi ten hours and fifty minutes after they asked for one, because if they were to say yes, you’d likely have a pretty irate passenger. I’m also impressed that after my reply, they didn’t respond with a “sorry bro, sucks to be you” or anything.
Thanks, Jeff for everything. You sure do lovely trip reports. And I finally get to see the rejuvenated hut, but from a safe distance. I don’t think your title was quite right. And I’m surprised that Parks permitted green steel on the hut, and not BC Parks brown.
I contend that if it starts and ends at Red Heather, it’s a Red Heather trip, and that if one sets out on a day trip with no camping stuff and happens to be nighted, it’s still a day trip. I think that still works even if one is nighted twice.
This might be pushing the definition of day trip methinks… Looks like the cab company just wanted to make sure you got your steps in for the day. Can’t have things be too easy.
“The human body was made to work” –Anton Afanassiev
Yeah, Squamish Taxi mercifully saved my goal of going around Garibaldi Lake under my own steam. Walking along the highway is, like, negative style points, though. We’ll see if I get around to fixing that.
I’ve been romantically telling the spouse that she’s the tuna to my oatorade. That would have never occurred to me without your inspiration.
Wow, just when I think your trip reports have peaked, you deliver another wild experience. Thanks for writing this up Jeff. Absolutely fantastic
Everyone my age that’s read this has told me that their favourite part is the tombstone, until they read the caption and think “the parents of current VOC students are too old to be part of the generation where teachers had no idea what to do in computer lab and just handed all the kids 5.25″ floppy disks with Oregon Trail on them. No, wait… the parents would be the Oregon Trail generation. I could be a VOC parent. Oh my god, we’re old.”