Vantage Ridge - March 21, 2008 Words by Lee Lau. Pictures by Lee Lau, Sharon Bader and Max Melchior

With the recent dump of snow and a forecast of more snow and winds today, we decided to play it safe and stick to protected treed slopes. The weatherman played a trick on us; we had some high clouds but generally, we had good weather all day. Today's destination was Goodlines/Vantage Ridge.

This is an area accessible from Cerise Creek. I knew there were at least 10+ people in Keith's Hut so was surprised to not see any tracks on the Anniversary Glacier. There were tracks from the previous day but they were very conservative, on low-angled slopes and below treeline. Understandable given the lack of visibility and amount of snow in the last while. We went up the ridge running N- S from Vantage. There wasn't actually much trail to break as we quickly picked up a track from a group who had departed earlier. We caught that group at about the 1900m mark, they turned off towards Vantage Pk proper and we geared up to ski off a minor summit on the ridge back to our skintrack start at about 1500m.

Vantage Peak and a peaklet on the ridge from Cerise Creek

Karl and Jedi on the skintrack. Joffre NW arm and Chief Pascall in the background

Given that the snow on N faces yesterday was fairly stable, it wasn't surprising that the snow on this NNW face was also stable. Ski cutting convexities produced no results. There was a fairly spectacular crown on a NW facing slope that was steep. The group ahead of us had found 40 - 60cms of storm snow (same as yesterday). We skied without further delay.

Kevin

Tyler

Sharon having a good day

Karl with boot-top; Jedi with face shots

We went a bit higher for our next run bumping into another group at the top of the ridge. We dropped off a NE facing slope skiing down from 2200m or so to 1700m in pretty fine snow.

Tyler on the skintrack - Twin One glacier and couloir in background

Panorama looks down from Vantage Ridge to Duffy Lake road. Caspar, Marriot and Rohr are the peaks from L to R

Panorama looks down from Vantage Ridge to east. Caspar ridge and Duffy Lake in background

Panorama from the skintrack up to Vantage Ridge. Matier, Anniversary Glacier, Joffre, Chief Pascall are from L to R

De-skinning

Lee

Max

Max on the backside of the run. Looks like the run's been well and truly skied

Our last run took us back skinning up to the ridgetop. It was warm and the snow on the W facing slopes we had ascended had degraded substantially due to the temperature spike. We managed to find a slightly NE aspect to descend and then scooted down through an avalanche path to get back to the Cerise Creek skiout.

Going back up for the last shot of the day

Kevin

Karl and Jedi

Tyler

Route on Chief Pascall is in pink - March 21st. Route to Vantage Ridge - March 22nd. Route to Joffre is green - March 15th.