This Be the Place - FAWK 2/16/2008
Trip: This Be the Place - FAWK
Date: 2/16/2008
Trip Report:So a group of five of us had had enough with day trips in powder (tuff tuff life) and wanted to bust out the traverse season. Avi hazard has been notoriously aggro over the last few months, and since it hadn't snowed for a bit and the rating was down to moderate, we figured a bigger trip was damn time: Place Glacier horseshoe traverse it was.
Common knowledge has it that North Joffre Creek is a slide alder purgatory, but we were surprised to find a wide open road that led to the very head of the valley, and the various ice climbs shining away quite prominently. We guessed about a 2hr ski from cars to base, and the climbs looked good to go.
Plan was to do the thing counter clockwise with an exit by Cassiope. We worked our way into the whited-out headwaters of North Joffre Creek and wound our way up excellent powder tree runs and into the alpine. Took a lot of determination to skin up such good skiing without being able to ski down it
Sure enough, we got above the fog about 5:00pm and views were pants filling:
We were hoping on a camp on the Place Glacier itself but we were faced with one last, quite steep, slope as a final barrier over onto the glacier. We debated how to attack the thing: some wanted to go up to the ridge top, but PB and I had once tried some steep couloirs over there fronting the 8 mile valley and knew that the ridge had 1800' of exposure on the other side. Problem slope at right:
I started skining up the left side of the slope to try to link into what looked like a bench system on the map, but things felt too steep and the slope was wickedly exposed over cliffbands.
We traversed back right to where it looked like we could bootpack up to the ridgetop. The sun was now going down and we had been going about 7 hrs nonstop. Looking up at GROC starting the bootpack:
Looking down to the glacier below:
Three seconds later, the whole slope cracked. We could see the crack right in front of us darting from rock outcrop to rock outcrop. We looked at each other and silently mouthed "D-O-N-T M-O-V-E" It was the proverbial car teetering on the edge of the cliff. There was a good four seconds of silence there where no one said anything, there wasn't a sound in the air, and all I remember was the hue of the sun going down over Saxifrage.
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There's screaming and gasping and I can see in my peripheral two or three other guys going in and out of the maw. I see the stauchwall approaching like some sick waterslide. The lights go out and I feel my right leg get twisted behind me like a piece of plastic. And then it stopped.
It took only a second to realize we were all okay, lucky that we had all been more or less on the crown when it went and were able to stay near the surface. Amazingly, the only thing missing was my poles, which GROC immediately tried to find before things set up overnight. Looking out to Saxifrage while sitting amid the dishwasher sized blocks:
We threw up camp and drank single malt and tried not to think what could have happened if we had continued on out left on the exposed part of the slope over the cliffbands.
Slope in the light of morning:
We only found one of my poles the next day so I skied out with one borrowed helistake. And life being the comical juxtaposition that it is at times, in the morning twelve heliskiers were deposited on the ridge right above us and whereas the night before was empty and cruel, the morning was a gong show of clownish proportions.
Helicopters were everywhere and I half expected to hear directions being shouted at the skiers a la Kilgore to the surfers in Apocalypse Now. Down in the forest on the way out we ran into a lost heli client and guided him down to the valley bottom, the day becoming one cruel and stupid joke compared to the night before.
Lessons? Within a moderate avalanche hazard rating there are always pockets of extreme. Never underestimate the danger of cross loading. Always look at your run-outs. Stop when you're bonking. I wanna say don't crowd together on a bootpack, but ironically that was probably a good thing for us here. And oddly enough, when you're bootpacking it somehow feels like you're safe because you're climbing . . .
Oh, and fuck it. Go bowling.
