Little Muddy Peak - November 30 2024
South Hozameen Range, Manning Park, BC
1855m
This trip report continues from that of Bojo Mountain, which we summited and skied down before making our way towards Little Muddy Peak. Once we got our skins back on, we had about a half-hour walk back up to the top of the trail below Grassy Mountain. At this point it was around quarter to 3, and with early sunsets being a thing less than a month away from winter solstice, we confirmed our suspicions that I'd have to save Mara Peak (the summit above the chair on the south side of the ski area) for another day, and that Little Muddy made the most sense to wrap the day up. Since we had around 100m to descend, we ripped our skins once more to ski down the trail (again, basically a road) until we got back onto the resort.
With that done, we slapped the skins on once more to walk up the short bit of the Horseshoe ski run (groomed) to the small bump between Grassy and Little Muddy where the chairlift tops out, awkwardly skin-skied down the other side to the low point where the marked "hike" we'd be using to access the peak starts (it is also used for some more adventurous runs by resort skiers), and started making our final climb of the day.
We had a decent skin track to follow up to around 1800m, where the mapped ski runs on my maps ended. From there, we followed some faint snowshoe tracks for another ~0.5km until the snowshoe tracks abruptly ended before actually getting to the summit. There seemed to be a trail through the trees, though we didn't see any markers to indicate one is maintained. The forest was sparse enough, though, that navigation wouldn't be hard in winter even without one.
Once we got to the long, fairly flat section above 1800m, the trees opened up along the traverse over to the final hill climb. That climb did not seem to have any sort of trail, so I just broke a random trail up the forest, which was sparse enough for that to work out without any bushwhacking. We reached the summit in about half an hour, thankfully with daylight still (just before 4pm), though we were definitely on-notice to try and get down with that still remaining.
Since we were pressed for time, we decided to skin-ski back to the spot where we would ski back onto the resort, since the snow was too thin to get down to the approach road directly (though this should go later in the season), and the way back had too many flats/undulations to justify ripping skins if we wanted to be time-efficient. We rushed to get the 15-minute walk back done with daylight still present, ripped our skins above the Apple Bowl run, then started our way down, for real.
We decided not to ski the aforementioned Apple Bowl, since that's not a cleared run, and needs a deeper snowpack to get over all the deadfall and whatnot, since it goes down to below 1550m before intersecting with the Poland Lake Trail. Instead, we skied down to join the Shadow run, which was unfortunately groomed, but on the plus side, had very open terrain to the sides which we could still enjoy some powder on 🙂
We got a little over 150m of vert on that before hitting the Poland Lake Trail once more, at which point we just skied the groomer back to the edge of the resort, then had a simple road ski back to the actual Gibson Pass Road. We skied all the way until the trail paralleled the road, though the final turn down to it did get a little sharky 😅. After that, we tried to shuffle along the skin track while it was still kinda downhill, but with about 300m left before the car, we crossed a bridge where the trail went slightly too uphill, so we just dipped onto the road and walked for the final couple minutes to the car.
Overall, I'd consider the day pretty successful. 3 peaks in about 6 hours is a pretty good time in my books, and we got to ski basically the entire thing. The skiing itself wasn't that exciting, admittedly, but I think it could be more exciting with a deeper snowpack, allowing you to hit the fall line from the summits down to the connecting roads. If you're purely about efficiency, though, snowshoeing is probably simpler, as you don't have to transition a bunch of times to get through the terrain effectively. At least there was enough skiing that Nick didn't hate me for it 😄