Into the White


The Bugaboos to Rogers Pass ski traverse is one of the most amazing adventures in British Columbia. Our photographer Kari Medig made it.

My face is hot and I can feel the sun’s radiation on my ears. A thin layer of sweat pools into a salty droplet and teeters at the tip of my nose. It falls to the snow at my feet. Another drop immediately replaces it. Followed by another, and then another, dropping to the rhythm of my breath and the laboured kicks of my ski boots as I move upwards through the wind-slabbed snow. We are in Bugaboos Provincial Park in the Purcell mountain range of British Columbia and post-holing up the Bugaboo- Snowpatch Col, a fifty degree strip of snow that separates two spires fabled in the history of Canadian rock climbing. We are ants amongst giants. To the left is Snowpatch spire, a granite monolith that rises from the Crescent glacier to a vertical series of cracks and pillars. At our right looms Bugaboo Spire's south ridge, a classic test piece first climbed by legendary Austrian guide Conrad Cain in 1913. Scrambling the spire's vertical cracks with only hemp ropes and leather boots, Cain's bold first ascent is widely regarded as years ahead of its time and a defining moment in Canadian alpinism. The sagas held in the granite fissures above are hard to ignore with each step up.

It's our first day on the Bugaboos to Rogers pass (the B2R) ski traverse. Our goal is to follow the spine of the Purcell and Selkirk Mountains from south to north. Starting in the world famous granite spires in Bugaboo Provincial Park, the route links a series of icefields, glaciers and mountain cols some 130 km to Rogers Pass, a popular ski mountaineering area in Glacier National Park just outside of Revelstoke. Over the last several years, the traverse has become a ski classic. The route is aesthetic. It stays predominantly high, rarely leaving the alpine for the confines of low forested river valleys. Like most mountain areas in Canada, it is remote and therefore necessary to be self sufficient in every way. This means a tent to live in and enough food and fuel to sustain independent travel every icy kilometre of topography enroute.

With each step, I feel the weight of this selfsufficiency pulling down on my shoulders, the soft snow buckling under me. My pack, with all the food, stoves, pots, tent, skis, and camera equipment weighs over 60 pounds. “Forty-nine! Fifty!” I count out the last of my steps to allow Chris, one of my three teammates, to take a turn. My lungs grasp for oxygen. “Nice one!” Chris clinks my ski pole and starts his fifty step shift, chewing off little bits of the 500 m climb in a game of trickery that is as much mental as physical. High above, the wind swirls in mini tornadoes funnelled by the col and deposits snow from a recent storm on our slope. It is early May in a ‘La Nina’ year, and the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean over a thousand kilometres further west, have deposited more snow in the region than in the past 12 years. My breathing returns to normal, and I find myself at the front again. I clamber the final steps to the wind-blown rock at the top of the col. I'm finally here. My head pokes into a sunbeam that temporarily blinds me. When my eyes adjust to the brightness, I see it : behold Pigeon Spire. Jutting hundreds of feet above the surface of the wind-scoured Vowell Glacier is a granite spire so diabolically rugged that my jaw drops. Chris wallows beside me in the steep final feet of the col. We both stand in disbelief waiting for our friends Carla and Pete to climb the hundreds of bootsteps towards us. We drop our skis onto the Vowell Glacier and point them north. Our ski tour has begun.

It would be the Americans, not the Canadians, who would first forge a ski traverse from the Bugaboos to Rogers Pass. In June of 1958 a team of four from the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club in New Hampshire set out from the Bugaboos to test their skills in the Canadian mountains. Led by a 21-year old Bill Briggs, who would famously become the first person to ski Wyoming's Grand Teton (4 199 m) 13 years later, the expedition found a bold high route through to the other side. Briggs attributes the ability to do the trip to the recent advances in ski technology at the time, including more modern back packs, new developments in climbing skins and the advent of skis with metal edges. Despite these modern day advancements, Briggs' team was missing one critical piece of the puzzle : a map. By 1958, only 20% of the route had been mapped by the Geological Survey of Canada, which meant the expedition was mostly done by sight alone. Despite this deficiency it took them only 10 days to arrive at Rogers Pass, sun burnt and tired, where they hopped a train back to civilization with two days of food left in their rucksacks. A respectable time to this day.

My eyes dart between the map, the compass, the GPS and the horizon. How could that be north? Jagged shapes move in and out of the white abyss in front of me. Was that a peak? Am I hallucinating? Roped together with our harnesses and crevasse rescue equipment clinking in the wind, I step forward into the whiteness, the line between horizon and snow has vanished. I move forward uncertainly, my skis feeling for bumps in the snow as though I am reading braille on an enormous white page. “Left 10 degrees!” Pete’s eyes are fixed on his GPS. I grope forward with my skis, using my poles like tentacles. The shapes of peaks and crevasses float fleetingly through the soup as I trudge along. We regroup on what the GPS says is the entrance to our descent. We huddle and wait as the cloud speeds by, slowly thinning to reveal the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain. We're at 3 200m, one of the highest points of the traverse, and atop yet another one of the dozen passes we had already climbed in the ten thousand cumulative meters we would ascend this trip. The clouds burn off and a view of the Grand Glacier opens up below. It spills down over the mountain rock in a series of steps, forming giant seracs and crevasses with each roll. But the glacial tongue looks smooth in the middle. Three meters of snow will bridge any crevasses that would surely swallow us … we hope. We ski fifteen hundred meters to the safety of the flat glacier below.

We have been on the traverse eight days now, or is it nine? Time is forgotten in the rhythmic routine that often defines such trips. Eat. Ski. Sleep. Eat. Ski. Sleep. Life is boiled down to its essence, becoming a flowing series of events. None of us contemplate the future or lament the past. Instead we deal with what is immediately in front of us : a crevasse, a col, a dinner. This is the allure of such trips for me, the simplicity of life that overshadows its immediate hardships and suffering. Is this how Buddhists feel when they meditate? I begin to feel more natural, far from the fabricated pressures and expectations put on us in the ‘real’ world. Glaciers lead to cols and past staggeringly beautiful mountains. Names of those who passed before us like Thorington, Malloy and Conrad glide past us in this sterile world of ice and snow. Wolverine and bear tracks criss-cross the snow. A mother grizzly and her cub scramble up a snow slope and stop high on the ridge above us. She stood sniffing the air on her haunches, trying to figure out just what are these strange and smelly creatures with sticks on their feet?

That night we sit next to a crackling fire in the Glacier Circle Cabin. The day started at 3 am. Led by the light of the aurora borealis we climbed the crevasse-pocked slopes on the Grand Glacier before the sun could heat its south slopes. We were at the infamous Deville rappel by 9am. Rappelling three rope-lengths with large packs and skis can be tricky, but we managed to glide down the rocky slope and within the hour we were combing a small flat cluster of trees in an otherwise impossibly steep mountain basin in search of the cabin. We find it buried under five meters of snow. After a good dose of food and laughter and the excitement of trading our tent for the warmth of a cabin, everyone grows quiet. Peter and Chris stare pensively through the steam rising from the tea in their bowls. I know what they were thinking, because I am thinking it too. Tomorrow is the last day of our trip. After a short climb from the Glacier Circle, we will gain the expanse of ice and seracs of the Illecillewaet Icefield and ski its expanse towards Mount Sir Donald before the final thousand meter descent to Rogers Pass. To the highway. To civilization. I try to forget this reality and enjoy my last few hours of freedom in the log walls of the cabin. “Hey! Check this out!” Pete breaks the silence. He holds up a candle to the wooden frame around the window. The view outside is three meters of snow. The aged wood is scribbled with dark black pencil. There are four names, amongst them is Bill Briggs, with this scrawled just above them : “Bugaboos to Rogers, June 1958.” I smile and wonder if the young Americans could ever have imagined the legacy that their first sojourn into these mountains would mean to adventurers over 50 years later. I run my hand over the names and thank them.

Text: Kari Medig
Photos: Kari Medig