Grassy Mountain (Manning Park) - November 30 2024
South Hozameen Range, Manning Park, BC
1889m
After spending the previous week+end enjoying the excellent opening-day powder at Whistler-Blackcomb, I was itching for some more summits. So, with bad weather forecast for the Sea-to-Sky on the coming Saturday, I turned my eyes east to find some easier, more forested peaks I could get even if the visibility was poor. I noticed that the Manning Park webcams looked skiable, and that the resort wasn't open yet, so I figured it was a good time to get the peaks above the ski hill there. I suckered Nick into the idea, convincing him that unskied powder there would be better than skied-out terrain at Whistler, and we set out Saturday morning. The drive from Squamish is tediously long, so despite getting up at around 5am, we actually arrived after 10:30am... Specifically we arrived at the Strawberry Flats parking area, as they put a gate there ~1.5km and 80m below the base of the ski resort itself, for... reasons.
My original plan (which was rather lacking in detail owing to the safeness of the terrain from an avalanche perspective, and the simplicity of "just walking up ski runs") was to just walk the road if it was gated and go up a green run, but we noticed that the Poland Lake trail started right at the parking area, had a broken skin track, and would actually gain a couple hundred metres by the time we got under the Orange Chair (vs the road which would gain less than 100), so we decided to go that way to take advantage of the efficiency. That slightly threw off my plan to get the lone southern peak first (Mara Peak), but that felt worth the gains of going this way. So, we set out at a super-casual quarter to eleven.
The skin track was set fairly well (probably 3 skiers before us had been there), and we made easy progress along it for the first ~1km, until we started leaving the initial "right beside the road" section, where we found a sketchy spot where a creek had nearly but not completely wiped the snowpack out. We did, at least, manage to step across without removing our skis, but be warned, this isn't (at least at the time of writing) totally skinnable/skiable without paying close attention. We also encountered (one of the) skin track setters who'd come up for some early morning laps, who informed us that the resort in their infinite wisdom had groomed most of the ski runs!!! That was disappointing, but he also mentioned that there were still a few which were left as powder, so that kept us from abandoning all hope 😄
We continued along the trail, which at this point became "just a snowed-over road", for about 20 more minutes, encountering a handful of deadfall and open creeks that needed minor manoeuvring to get around, until we hit some equipment tracks from the resort, indicating we were about to enter the resort boundary. Other than "time elapsed and progress was made", the only other thing of note was the sparse snow coverage in the trees, meaning taking anything other than the resort runs down would be a bad time. We were hoping to minimize the time spent on the resort, just to not have to deal with any awkward encounters with staff. To be clear, this is a provincial park, you totally can be there, but that doesn't mean everyone is on the same page and is happy about it. So, we continued on the now-groomed cat track of the Poland Lake Trail.
Another 10 minutes went by, and we found ourselves a bit above 1600m, at the point where the Poland Lake Trail departs from the cat track going to the top of the chair, and instead dives into the forest, cutting west across the resort towards Grassy Mountain. There was an old snowshoe track going that way, and since it was a bit more direct, and kept us away from places we were likely to encounter staff, we decided to follow that instead of staying on the groomed road.
The skinning got slightly harder once we switched to following that old snowshoe track. Not so much because I had to break trail, ski penetration on the old track was a couple centimetres at the most, but because the terrain was less even, it got a lot closer to the trees, it was steeper, and there was more sidehilling without the snow below being thoroughly compacted. On the plus side, the views started to open up, and we got to see the surrounding peaks of Manning Park, which I think look pretty great in winter.
We followed the old tracks past the spot at 1670m, where the official Poland Lake Trail starts to switchback up the mountain, and instead continued the sidehilling traverse. This continued until about 1700m, where Nick was starting to be less-than-thrilled with the imperfect skinning conditions, so I was looking for nicer terrain to get us up to the main trail once again. There, I broke us a trail up Hokey's Hollow for about 50m of vert, which deposited us onto the cat track once more, just above the col between Little Muddy Peak (to the east of the chairlift), and Grassy Mountain itself.
Once we hit the cat track, we had a short skin-ski down before the trail turned off to skier's right of the resort, and we resumed the trail-breaking on top of old tracks. This was, once again, a snow-covered road, so the skinning was pretty uneventful, and we didn't stop until about 12:15pm, when we hit a fork where the last visitors had shortcut the trail. We had a brief break here for Nick to apply a blister band-aid, since his new boots were apparently giving him a little heck on this tour.
With that taken care of, we decided to follow the shortcut, which was nice in the sense that it allowed us to determine that at least this high up, more open trees WERE skiable, and as such we had no issues skinning up the shortcut (though one dry creek we crossed higher than necessary took an extra minute or two out of the day). Once we hit the trail, we basically immediately departed it again on the north side to go towards the summit. The maps show that there's no road here, but the terrain is so open that if you told me there was one, I'd believe it. There were a couple spots near the top where we had to squeeze through some trees, but nothing I'd go so far as to call bushwhacking, and all very much skinnable/hikeable.
With that, in a bit under 2 hours, we had the first peak of the day out of the way, and we didn't even need to pay for a lift ticket to get it 🙂 For once, Nick even actually skinned all the way to the top too, which was quite exciting (as a purist skier, he has exactly 0 interest in peakbagging, and routinely stops a couple metres below the summit when it offers no extra skiing for the way down).
We were happy to have decent summit views on a day we expected to mostly be socked in. We didn't linger for more than about 10 minutes, though, as I even managed to convince Nick a second peak was a good idea 😄 So, we ripped our skins, and set out to shortcut the forest back to the Poland Lake Trail, making our way towards Bojo Mountain next...