Cowboy Ridge - March 8 2023
Fitzsimmons Range, Whistler, British Columbia
2026m
On Sunday, I had wanted to get out into the backcountry again and go for Whirlwind and Fissile peaks in the Fitzsimmons, but unfortunately, I got socked in something serious by the fog, the worst I'd ever been in. Skiing down anything unmarked was sketchy enough, let along backcountry skiing, so I cut my losses and headed home before noon. The dream didn't die, however, so as the week started, and the forecast started showing a good snowpack and a nice high-pressure system coming in, a retry was planned. I suckered my ski buddy Nick into joining for the fun, and also met up with my neighbour Philip who happened to be going up to the Kees+Claire Hut for a couple days, and we made our way up for a "delayed start workday".
We got an early chair up the Peak Express, but decided to ski down to Symphony and save some elevation gain to make Nick happy (he was there for the skiing, not for the peakbagging), at the expense of a little time (I recommend those going for speed to take whichever alpine chair opens first, then just ski to the uphill track below the Symphony chair, and skin up once you stop gliding). We ended up starting from the beacon check station on the Flute uptrack at 10:00 almost exactly.
We skinned up the cat track to Flute summit in about 20 minutes, but didn't dawdle, and went right to the entrance to Musical Bumps to get our first ski in of the day down to the Flute-Oboe col. There was about 5-10cm of fresh snow, so we had no issue finding pleasurable fresh tracks to eat up for the first ~100m of descent.
From there, we put our skins back on, and made our way up toward Oboe Summit, although we didn't tag the summit since I'm the only one who cares about such things, and I already did that in December. We spent about half an hour on that skin, then ripped once more for the ski down to the low col before the bigger gain up to Cowboy Ridge. The skiing here was longer, so I'd say it was more enjoyable just because of that, about 250m of descent vs just 100m from Flute to Oboe.
The skin up to Cowboy Ridge was the crux of the day, it turns out. It's about 300m gain to the top, then another ~500 to the top of Whirlwind+Fissile, so it's definitely "the meat" of the journey. We started out alright, but Nick was blistering up in his boots and was also feeling the exertion of going uphill for the first time in a while, so things slowed down fairly quickly. All things considered, though, we still didn't make bad time, and got to 1960m in about 50 minutes, where I thought I was looking at the top of Cowboy Ridge, so I told Nick to go meet Philip (who had gone on ahead) at the hut around the corner (without elevation gain), while I tagged what I thought was the peak.
The skin to the "top" of Cowboy Ridge was pretty enjoyable, I gained the last 60m in about 7 minutes, which would be an amazing pace if only sustainable over meaningful distances😂. Instead of maintaining breakneck speed, though, I instead fumbled with my slightly icy bindings and skied down skins-on to the hut to meet the guys who'd just rolled in as I came over the ridge, where we figured out our plans.
At the hut, Nick was pretty gassed and not interested in waiting around at the hut for a summit party, so we turned back there. Philip joined us for the descent, since he had all day, and the wind wasn't super strong for good kiting (his new favourite pastime), so he figured he'd enjoy some skiing with company while he had it. We skinned back up the ridge to the true summit of Cowboy Ridge this time (at least me and Philip did, Nick went as far as was useful to access our ski line down to Singing Pass). It was a pretty uneventful skin, and the summit was pretty broad+boring, but at least I got to technically say I jumped the summit cornice on my ski down to the col between Cowboy and Russet Ridges.
After tagging Cowboy's summit, we went over to do the same on Russet Ridge before heading down. The col is pretty small between the two, so we linked that up pretty fast, and got into ski mode for the last time at about 2:10pm (a bit later than expected for the abridged trip, but hey, at least I had signal to respond to slack messages, and I did conservatively block my calendar in case).
After a short approach to the lip of the slope, we found ourselves over a pretty nice-looking, steep slope on a lee aspect from the recent winds, with some pretty nice looking snow which had minimal tracks. We dropped into the ~300m slope of open powder turns and enjoyed some excellent skiing, some of the best I've had all year. Nick apparently got a little too excited, as he caught up to me from behind, but promptly (apparently) regretted his choice, and took a pretty epic fall. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was just doing a proper stress test of his bindings, gotta make sure they're still working, you know? After a couple minutes of ski retrieval, we found ourselves at about 1650m, just on the wrong side of Melody Creek from Singing Pass.
Here, Philip decided the skiing was too much fun, and went back up to lap that face while he had time before bedtime/dark, and Nick+I went creek-crossing to get onto Singing Pass to ski out to the car and get home with enough time to pretend we're good employees still. We spent about 15 minutes crossing, skiing, and bootpacking back onto the trail (easily bridged at this elevation, but getting up involved a couple attempts to ski and just meet it before we gave up and just booted up before we got too low and ended up back in the creek). From there, it was the usual Singing Pass exit: icy, narrow, but overall mostly downhill and better than walking. I don't know what's wrong with my skiing, but while all my friends I've talked to seem to feel it in their legs, I always feel it in the sides of my abs from trying to ski on the same sidehill for so long. It was, at least, better than the last time (maybe I'm getting used to it?). All the creeks were bridged, and the skis stayed on all the way to the village, at least, so that is about as much as you can ask for. We got down at about 3:40, then headed back to Squamish in very pleasant weekday traffic (or the lack thereof). If only more of my Whistler trips ended like that...
Overall not the day I was originally planning for, but still fun, and since I submitted Cowboy Ridge as a provisional peak (it looks distinctive, and has over 100m of prominence, so given some of the crap I see on Peakbagger, I think that's justified), I still get to say I bagged something. The skiing off of Russet Ridge was really quite excellent, so that in and of itself made the day still rewarding, and it's always nice to have company, I rarely get out with more than just 1 other person, so that was a refreshing change. I'd recommend a trip like this for skiers, but peakbaggers would probably want to link this up with more peaks in one go.