April 3rd, 2011:
Pat and I decided to head out this weekend on a relaxed note and possibly attempt to ski up the North-East face of Mt. Castleguard and if we felt like it we would also head for the South-East ridge of Mt. Andromeda. We were heading out more for the winter camping experience. The chance to head up onto a peak was just the icing on the cake. We parked along the “Big Bend” on the Icefields Parkway and skied up towards the Saskatchewan Glacier @ 1000h. By 1130h we had reached the toe of the glacier. Ski penetration on the glacier was 5-15cm deep. We skied up to 8150ft by 1500h and made camp to spend the night. We dug and built a wall high enough to equal the height of the tent. We left room at the front to be sheltered for cooking. Since we were using a 3 season tent we also packed snow around the base to cut the draft of cold air from coming under the fly. Cooking was a little bit of a hassle. The Whisperlite stove kept puttering out even though it was protected from the wind and had enough gas pressure. We found that keeping the bottle of fuel facing down resolved the problem. Weird since I never had that problem in the summer. Maybe the cold? The weather was great all day. It was -7C at the parking lot and it reached 0C in the afternoon on the glacier with clear skies. We did get cloud cover before dinner around 1700h which turned into a short white-out. Just in case we made sure to take a compass bearing (60 degrees or NNE) to head back down the glacier.
April 4th, 2011:
Sleep was on and off last night. It was quite windy and it snowed about 10-15cm. We woke up at 0700h and found bad visibility outside so we decided to sleep some more and hope for the better. When we woke up at 0915h it was nice to find the temperature around +4C in the tent. The wind was still moderately strong and visibility hadn’t changed with about 200-500m at best. We decided to get out and stretch the legs at 1330h and see what the visibility was like as we skied towards Mt. Castleguard. We had marked the snow wall of the tent with colourful objects that we had brought to help us find it on the way back. We didn’t get out farther than 15min until decided we should turn around. By now we had just lost visibility of the tent. It had also snowed enough to have me worried about wind loading and wind crusts on the slopes that would have been encountered if we went further out towards Mt. Castleguard. I should also note that it would of been helpful to have wands to place along the way if we were to have attempted to go further out to Mt. Castleguard or Mt. Andromeda. On the way back I placed Pat in a crevasse rescue scenario and had him practice “rescuing” me. It was -8C in the afternoon and we didn’t see much of the sun all day.
April 5th, 2011:
Woke up again to white-out visibility but this time it was even worse. There was maybe 100m of visibility at 0800h this morning. We decided to cook breakfast and slowly packed up our stuff to head out. We started skiing out by 1230h with 20cm of ski penetration. Too bad, since the ski out could of been quite faster if it would of been frozen crust. We reached the toe of the glacier by 1400h. The last km on the glacier was steep enough to enjoy a few turns on windblown snow. We crossed the gravel flats and skied down the trail through trees to reach the van by 1600h. It was about 18km from our high camp on the glacier to the van with 800m of elevation gain. Since our birthday's are coming up we decided to split the cost and finally buy a GPS.
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