Anif Peak - May 22 2022
Coast Mountains, Squamish, British Columbia
1645m
With the last couple weeks being rather miserable and rainy, me getting sick, and me being out of town for another couple weeks, I had a bit of a break from the mountains. But I got healthy and free just at the right time, as this long weekend promises clear skies and low wind, so to the mountains we go! The first day of the weekend (the day of this peak, Friday) certainly lived up to that.
So, after going out last weekend down Mamquam River FSR with my trusty but albeit anemic FWD sedan and determining it can, in fact, get down at to least before the second bridge, we decided to try and get some of the peaks in that area, starting with the pair of Anif Peak and Mount Mulligan on the first day. Hopefully this weekend will also see Alpen Mountain knocked out. Mulligan has a separate TR, and since it is the second peak we did, it continues from the end of this one.
Logan drove up from the city Friday night so we could get an early start. Sadly, I set my alarm for 4:50pm instead of am, so we ended up getting to the trailhead at about 7:00, but we figured we should be able to get up to the peak before the snow gets the worst it would get, and if it was really bad we could wait up at the peak for things to start cooling off again. This time, and for the second time ever, I was trying to skimo the peak (Logan stuck with snowshoes), so we cared more about avalanches than we normally do (actually had transceivers on and on our persons), and also expected things to go a bit slower due to my lack of practice skinning or dealing with bindings. Also while I did get some fancy new touring skis, my boots can be easily classified as "very heavy", so I had some extra baggage to haul up 😅.
We set out from the car, just after the turn-off from the main FSR at about 7:10. Here, there was no snow at all, and the road was very well-defined. If I had a bit more knowledge about the terrain above me, I might've tried driving further. Anyone with 7+" of clearance and decent skill could get up all the way to the snowline, I think. Not very articulated or super-steep, and there's places to turn off fairly often.
Thankfully, despite the fact that we started all the way at the bottom, we made pretty quick work of the slog up the road, and about 1.5hrs and a bit of over 4km in, we hit consistent snow. So while on the map it looks like a considerable loss to not be able to drive up, it's pretty easy walking so it wasn't too noticeable.
From here we continued to walk up, the snow was still holding firm with a decent crust from the last night. There weren't many tracks here, a couple of faint skin tracks, and that's it. We bootpacked seemingly for a good while past where the previous parties had transitioned, but after my first (failed) attempt to skimo, I resolved to not skin up until I started postholing. The trees opened up a bit here, and we got to the fork for Mulligan and Anif in just under 2 hours. Sadly, despite reading that Mulligan->Anif is better than the reverse for skiing, we totally didn't clue in to this at the time, and continue to Anif instead of forking left.
This part of the trail was fairly flat, so we kept going fairly quickly, as much as the snow would let us, as it was getting a bit softer past 9am in the ~20 degree and sunny weekend weather. We got mostly through this forked path (the Mulligan path reconvenes with the Anif Peak one in a couple kilometres of detouring), but shortly after 9:30 we started postholing somewhat consistently, so on went the snowshoes for Logan, and I fumbled around with skis, boots (i was in trail runners to this point, as my boots are too heavy/stiff to bootpack meaningful distances in), and skins for 15 minutes.
We resumed the climb thereafter, and after the first 15 (definitely slower) minutes, we hit out first obstacle: the faint skin track we'd been following diverged from the GPS track. We had previously suffered from not following the GPS path, so we decided to try and head to climber's right to regain the path. This was... a mistake, and after 10 minutes of fumbling through trees to see a whole lot of not-much-traversable terrain, we went back to the skin tracks and hoped they'd not lead us astray.
This led us out of the mellower, open area back into steeper forest. It was also a great reminder that I really should invest in ski crampons, as some of the lines taken were a bit steeper than I was really prepared for, and I spent a good 15 minutes trying to extricate myself from a failed turn attempt, which culminated on me having to take my skis off and try and get back into pin bindings on a steep slope with no even ground. 10/10 would not recommend, maybe take your brand new skis to a more beginner-friendly environment to get a feel for them before just yeeting up a random mountain with them. But, a bit over 3.5 hours in, or about 10:40, we got to the point where the Mulligan trail should meet back up with Anif Peak's.
Here, we thought it mellowed back out, as we followed the skin tracks past this point, but 15 minutes of blindly following these tracks, they abruptly ended. So we checked our GPSes and realized this was just leading us around the mountain with not a whole lot of ways up. We did, at least, get a decent view from here, though.
So, we circled back, and found where the trailbreakers must've tried to rejoin the trail. It wasn't just going back to the point where the forks met, which in retrospect might've been a bit easier terrain. But we figured following skin tracks made it more likely that we'd be in for ski-friendly terrain, so we decided to follow these too. We slogged through more steep forest, and at about 11:40 the trees opened up a bit again, and we saw what looked like a sub-summit of the peak.
With some hope filling our now-sore bodies, we pushed on up (albeit a bit slowly, as the snow by now was fairly wet and difficult to get through, plus we had seen avy debris in a few spots on the way up as well and were being careful) toward the sub-summit. 50 minutes of slogging later and we were at what our GPSes and AllTrails consider the summit.
However, this did not look like the real summit, and the track (despite showing the peak as where we were) continued for a bit, so we walked along the summit ridge to the true summit, and got some slightly nicer views with less trees blocking the way. Sadly it seems the previous skiers had bootpacked this section so the way was a bit bumpier than I'd have liked, but it's only a couple minutes so definitely worth making sure we got the true summit.
After a nice lunch break, and meeting some snowshoers and hikers who came up after us (who were very appreciative of our trailbreaking), we started our descent. After doing all the trailbreaking to this point, with my heavy ski setup, I was ready for some payoff getting back down to the fork. The snow was pretty heavy, sticky, and wet, but I didn't care. The turns were still pretty fun, and a rare gem for someone who has very infrequently experienced untouched snow on skis.
After about 25 minutes, most of which were waiting for Logan to plod down the soft snow on snowshoes, we were mostly on the way back to the fork, and had re-entered the trees when we met a couple of hikers who apparently had forgotten both snowshoes and water. Thankfully enough people had broken trail after us in both snowshoes and boots to make the path doable for them, and I'm a camel, so I spared a couple hundreds mLs of water for them, and another 30 minutes later we got to the fork where one must decide if they're going up Mulligan or back down. We, of course, weren't going to pass up the opportunity to bag another peak (it was only 1:45), so the skins went back on, and we started the plod up to Mt Mulligan.