Gravell Peak - December 1 2024

Wedge Group, Pemberton, BC
2091m

After reading Steven's trip report on this peak and seeing him describe it as a potential skiing classic, I knew I had to get this peak skied. I mentioned it to my buddy Kelly a few weeks prior as something that would be pretty cool when low-elevations were still bare, but higher elevations had enough snowpack to ski. Fast-forward to the day(s) leading up this, and apparently a large group had decided that was a good idea, and formed a plan around it! I made sure to invite myself, and met up with Kelly and his friend Nima in Whistler, then we carpooled up to Pemberton. We took his FJ instead of my crossover as we didn't really know the condition of the roads, and more capability is better in those situations. That paid off, because when we met up with the other 5 people (huge party) at about 650m elevation, half of them wanted to take the western fork of the road, and were going to park there and start walking. Both Kelly and I had looked into the eastern route and found it to be more appealing, so we decided to split into 2 groups, and with the power of the reliable FJ, we drove up to just over 900m before the road forked and became too overgrown to drive.

There, the 3 snowshoers (Spenny, Nima, and Andrew) who'd agreed to take the direct north couloir got geared up a little faster and set out ahead of us, and we started up behind them at 8:17am. Sadly, not 2 minutes after we left the car, our spur started to get quite nastily overgrown, and the bushwhack commenced 😅

The bushwhack along the overgrown road was too dense to skin effectively, so we removed our skis, and carried them through for a couple hundred metres until we found a slightly better-looking slope to climber's left of the trail, shortcutting the first switchback of the spur. That looked much easier to deal with, so we clambered up that and started skinning up the forest instead. The coverage was thin, but enough to skin, at least, so travel got a bit easier. With a little routefinding and manoeuvring, we got ourselves to the road on the other side of the switchback, followed it for a couple fairly open minutes, then dove back into the forest before the final switchback, as the road was getting worse again.

We continued the bushwhack until about 80 minutes had elapsed, and we finally got through the various sections of barely-covered deadfall, dense clusters of trees requiring circumvention, devil's club, and alder, where we climbed up a short wall in a little drainage gully, and broke out into some more open boulders at 1100m.

As we got into the open terrain, we were quite happy to find "probably skiable" coverage, much easier travel, and even our snowshoeing friends who'd so kindly left us behind at the start 🤣 That wouldn't be much of a problem, though, as the combination of the extra length of skis helping to avoid holes in the boulder field along with Kelly's excellent fitness meant that he took over trail-breaking (which thankfully wasn't that bad, under 10cm of ski penetration), and we caught up to and quickly passed the snowshoers in the boulders. If you're heading up here in early/late season, climber's left seems to get better coverage with fewer boulders, though on the way down you need to make sure to get over to skier's left early enough to hit the uptrack in the bush at the right time.

From this point, the terrain was pretty simple, just "go up the big gully", so we started gaining elevation much more efficiently. The next half hour brought us from ~1240m to ~1460m, a pretty efficient pace for winter travel. By this point, the couloir starts forming, and avalanche conditions become something to watch out for, so take note of that. We found ourselves with a pretty stable snowpack, with no activity noted in the last couple days, and no signs of instability from our checks as we climbed, nor any indications of instability from debris on the slope, so we pressed on in high spirits.

Another 50 minutes of switchbacking up the couloir later (good thing this isn't popular, or other skiers might've been upset at us switchbacking for so long and not booting to preserve the snow 😅), and we arrived at a small safe spot (~1770m) below a small fork in the couloir, where I stopped for a short bio break as Kelly continued on breaking the trail like a champ. He pulled ahead by about 10-15 minutes while I enjoyed the joys of combining colitis and mountaineering, then I started trying to catch up. Normally I'd have no chance of catching up to him, but I think we found a great equalizer for our differing fitness: just have him break trail all day 😄

15 minutes later and I'd caught up to Kelly, who was just finishing a transition to bootpacking, a touch below 1900m. Here, the couloir narrowed to a bit of a steeper choke, which merited putting our skis on our packs. While Kelly started breaking the trail ahead, I wasted about 10-15 minutes utterly failing to use my ascent plates (I swear I test fit them beforehand, but they just refused to play nice. That'll be a problem to work out at home...). After much cursing and cold hands, I gave up on that and just followed the track up with my crampons, which given I was the second man up, really wasn't a big deal. The first 1/3 of the bootpack was kinda crappy, with all the steps having collapsed, but after that, things got better, and I was able to re-use the steps that had been left so kindly for me 🙂

After 15 minutes of booting up about 40m of vert (not very efficient travel with deep boot penetration), things mellowed out enough to slap the skis back on, and I started walking towards the sunny ridge that was now tantalizingly close.

After a couple short minutes, I turned onto the ridge and started making my way back west towards the summit in the glorious sunlight! The weather was actually great, so I got to enjoy some very pleasant skinning in the warm sun without any wind to ruin the fun.

I guess the sun was energizing or something, because I cranked out the remaining ~150m in about 15 minutes, joining Kelly on the summit just before 4:45 into the day, or a little before 1pm.

After taking some summit photos, we slapped our skis in the snow facing the sun to let the skins dry (not that it was necessary, the snow was fairly dry and light on top), and just hung out, waiting for both the snowshoers who were following us up our route, and the "other car" team coming up from the west side. It was a good thing the weather was nice, otherwise we'd probably not have enjoyed the waiting all that much. In these conditions, though, it was pretty pleasant, especially with the surprise excellent views.

We chilled, texted (excellent cell service on this peak, good for your local on-call engineer 😅), and peeked over the sides of the mountain for a good while, until about 50 minutes later, Spenny, Nima, and Andrew appeared on the eastern ridge, re-uniting the self-proclaimed A-Team on the summit 🙂

Maybe 5 minutes after the full A-Team assembled at the top, the B-Team (who'd been visible for a little while making their way up the rolling terrain to the west) rolled in as well, and the whole 8-person party was reunited.

Once we were all assembled, we discussed our descent plan (the skiers would go first, as we were rested+ready, and would have to transition+bushwhack on foot at the end, which is not the best use-case for skis, and the snowshoers would all descend the gully, and hike the road out, since they weren't enthusiastic about descending the alternate uptrack), took some photos, then parted ways. 75 minutes was one of the longer summit stays of my life, but I guess that's what an annoyingly early start and an excellent partner breaking trail will enable for you 🙂

The snow was fairly good, slightly heavy, but still dry and powder, a typical west coast kind of deal. Getting down to the choke was pretty simple/pleasant skiing, though I definitely quickly noticed how gassed my legs were 😅. As a result of the side effects of my recent meds, resort skiing a full day is basically not possible for me right now, so my ski legs are definitely still MIA.

The choke was tight but skiable even by a noob like me, so getting through that was slow but still comprised of turns rather than side-slipping. Once we got below it, the slopes opened up, and it was just decently, but not scarily steep skiing all the way down to the boulder fields 🙂

As we got down to around 1400m, we had to slow down and start planning our route a bit more to keep our skis on snow instead of rocks/bush, and to make sure we could get more vert skiing vs booting, but also not trap ourselves down a drainage we didn't want to be in.

Things slowed down a lot below 1200m as we tried to pick our way down the thinly-covered boulders without bottoming out, and staying in "workable" terrain to regain the uptrack before the bushwhack commenced. I took a bit of a gamble skiing further to skier's right, as the terrain looked nicer, but that ended up putting me on the wrong side of a couple creeks, so I had to put my skins on a bit early at ~1120m, and spent about 40 minutes getting down the next ~70m with skins on, bushwhacking and skin-skiing awkwardly until things got flat and bushy enough that Kelly decided it was time to join me in the suffering, and switch over to bootpacking.

About 20 minutes of booting later, and we got ourselves onto the road itself, though with much postholing, skis getting caught in branches, tree-bombs unloading onto our heads, and cursing in the process 😅. Once we were on the road, travel was simpler, but still not easy, as we postholed through the snowshoe and/or ski tracks with every step, in addition to the annoying alder and devil's club we had to deal with.

Amusingly, that extra difficulty on the descent allowed the snowshoers to catch up right as we got to the car, and we ended up with accidentally great timing! Most of the skiing took about 20 minutes, and dropped us from 2091m to ~1200m, but the last <300m of descent took about 90 minutes 🙃

I guess you could wait for a deeper snowpack, which would cover the bushy approach more, but then you have to skin more of the road, so it's a tradeoff. Overall, the entire day took under 8 hours, including over an hour on the summit, so I think the balance of factors worked out well for us. We still got to ski the entirety of the good stuff, so that's the most important part. 10/10 would ski again (except, you know, no repeating peaks 😄).

GPX Track + Map