Mount Henning - March 16 2025
Mount Thynne Area, Coquihalla, British Columbia
1827m
Over the last month, peakbagging has proved to be elusive. Weather has been pretty unpleasant from a peakbagger's perspective (at least on weekends), avalanche conditions have been quite touchy, and I ended up just skiing for most of my days off. On top of that, the couple peaks I have tried for have ended in failure, largely for logistical reasons like a lack of time, and old beta that has resulted in horrid alder-filled bushwhacks that I hadn't accounted for 😅
So, with that being how things had gone for quite a while, I decided that I just had to get out and get something this weekend. Sadly, my on-call schedule at work and them taking full advantage of that fact threw quite a large wrench into my plans. I worked Friday until bedtime, and on Saturday the same. I went to bed expecting to largely have wiped my hands clean, so I got Logan, who'd just returned from a vacation, to commit to join me for this peak (and maybe some others in the area) for the Sunday. Sadly, as we were driving over, duty called once again, and we ended spending most of the day in a Tim's in Hope until like 4pm 🙃
Eventually, though, my laptop battery died and I just couldn't stay any longer, so we gathered ourselves and drove up to Britton Creek Rest Area, where we'd planned our GPX track to start. Once we got there, we realised the "proper" starting point was actually a little down the road, at the staging area maintained by the Coquihalla Summit Snowmobile Club. Now, we've previously had not-so-great experiences with sled clubs (especially the local Black Tusk one in Squamish, you can read about that here), so we weren't expecting things to go great when we rolled in. However, to our delight, when we asked if we could park there, they readily agreed, and laughed at our intent to go ski all the way down their sled roads for a few mellow turns on Mount Henning 😄
So, with that sorted out, we parked, got ourselves geared up, and started walking at 4:41pm, one of the least-alpine starts of our peakbagging careers 🙃 But hey, sunset is decently late after Daylight Savings, so we still had a chance to summit and get the meaningful skiing done with daylight, and the terrain wasn't exactly challenging. While we originally had planned for bonus peaks, we more or less discarded the idea of extra summits, and just focused on the most-sure-bet, Mount Henning.
From the trailhead, we headed north for a few steps, then turned east onto the road going up Mount Henning. While I skinned from the car, Logan kept his snowshoes on his back, and just booted on the quite-firm cat track. While this didn't make for exciting skiing, it did make for safe skiing, and easy travel while we had limited time, which worked out nicely for us.
We made it about 25 minutes into the hike up until my colitis reared its ugly head, of course. I suspect throwing off my timing by starting so late, and therefore having been forced to eat lunch at Tim's didn't help, so we needed a 10-minute break on the side of the road to deal with that before we started moving again. Thankfully it wasn't very cold or windy in the forest, so it wasn't that uncomfortable.
After that bit of unpleasantness, we soldiered on until about 6pm, where we hit the local high-point (~1650m) just before the trail forks, and we would have to descend towards the cabins at the base of Mount Henning. We enjoyed the surprisingly decent vis for a supposedly stormy day, made sure we took the correct fork (there are a good few), and made the short descent to the cabins.
After admiring the fairly-nice-looking cabins (compared to most backcountry huts, they looked like straight-up houses), we decided not to follow the few sled tracks that went straight up towards the summit, but to continue following the road, since we didn't want those to abruptly end and force us to break trail in unknown terrain, when we knew the road would go up another 100m of elevation and was almost certainly groomed or at least tracked out.
The road was a fairly short walk, along with a small amount of descent, which lasted about 5 minutes until it abruptly turned uphill, more or less going straight up the face, which we didn't quite expect.
This section of road was quite punishing, and I had to put my biggest risers on to avoid slipping while we moved uphill, which is generally an indicator that a skin track (or in this case, sled track) is inefficiently-steep. That being said, we did gain ~125m in 15 minutes, which is a pretty solid pace. I attribute that to the fairly casual grade and not-that-long route we'd had to that point. Once we got about 100m of the way up, the grade levelled off, and we could see some tracks going up onto the ridge to climber's left. We considered following them initially, but decided to keep following the road (at this point not really discernible as a road, but just sled tracks following the route we expected), since it got a bit higher onto the ridge, and we hoped that would save us some effort.
Once we hit the high point of the road, it was time to work a little for our summit, and break some trail up onto the ridge through the forest! Since I was on skis, I went ahead, as a single snowshoer's tracks won't really help a skier at all, but the skin track will help the snowshoer a decent amount. The snow was DEEP and quite soft, which got me excited about the way down, but it made for some pretty hard work 😅 The first few curves through the trees were not too difficult, but as we poked out towards the north side of the ridge, the grade got fairly steep, and we had to make some tight switchbacks to make our way up.
After a decent amount of tedious switchbacking, we got onto the ridge, and of course, found more sled tracks that came from an easier route up 😅, probably the first tracks we saw as we were coming up from the flat road. Oh well.
We stopped for a few minutes on the first high point of the ridge, where Logan had to make some emergency backpack repairs (read: stuffing some stuff at the bottom to plug an expanding hole), and I had to make some careful moves to bushwhack down a couple metres and get to the next section of the ridge through some denser trees. This only took a couple minutes, though, and we quickly entered more open terrain on the S ridge of the mountain.
From there, we had much simpler travel, and just wandered along the ridge for about 10 minutes until we got to the summit! We found a few sled tracks coming up near (but not onto) the summit from the bowl, so we probably could've just accepted the elevation loss and followed those 99% of the way, but hey, that wouldn't be as satisfying. At least, that's the justification we gave ourselves.
We hung out on the summit for a little under 10 minutes, as we weren't really that tired, and we were also racing the clock, hoping to get back onto the road before we needed to bust headlamps out. Since the ridge was quite gentle, and we planned to follow some other tracks we saw on the south side which might have allowed us to avoid the bushwhack and any undulation on the ski down, I kept my skins on until I was confident we were definitely headed downhill.
We skinned/snowshoed back for about 500m until about the 1770m contour, where things looked sufficiently "definitely downhill" that I felt it was a good time to rip my skins. The weather got cold enough that transitioning was annoyingly frigid for my fingers, but we managed to do it fast enough that I didn't need to put my headlamp on. In retrospect, it might've been wise to do so anyways, as my depth perception in the dim light wasn't amazing, so I couldn't ski all that hard, but it was nice to avoid faffing about with more stuff on the colder ridge, if nothing else.
We ended up traversing further east than we perhaps needed to, just trying to follow tracks and get to terrain where we could see the way down. In reality, the trees aren't all that dense, and the less east you go, the less road walking you'll have at the end, and the better fall line you'll get. The snow was super nice, though, and despite the sledder activity, there was plenty of fresh stuff to just ski down and not care. Since Logan was on snowshoes, the extra traversing probably was worth it so he had an easier time getting down, so perhaps we did strike the right balance after all.
I enjoyed a few turns in the open trees, at my usual "few turns then wait" pace I take when skiing with snowshoers 🙂. The run didn't last all that long, unfortunately. We expected as much, but I'd hoped when planning the day that we might get the chance to do some laps, or get extra peaks, which would enable more skiing that wasn't just on a road. Oh well, better than not getting to ski powder 🤷
With our snowshoe-adjusted pace, it took a bit under 15 minutes to get down to the road. There, we transitioned back to boots (it didn't make sense to put skins on for the short walk back to the 1650m high point of the road) and started the ~700m trek back to that point. Once we got back there, we slapped our headlamps on, I gave Logan my outer mitts (my fingers got better once we were skiing down, since I put my liners on, but his got colder, for some reason), and we moved to the "ski until the next uphill" program 😄
I skied the next ~1km in one go, until I hit the one big undulation in this section of road. That flat/uphill section was only 100-200m, though, so not a big deal on your way back. Plus, since it's groomed well, you can just walk it, no skins required. I let Logan catch up there, and then it was 2.5 downhill kilometres to the car! I stopped a couple times to let him catch up, but if you want to, you can just send it all the way back. The sledders were nice enough to leave some powder on the sides of the road, which helped my still-pretty-messed-up left ankle avoid too much pain from the otherwise roughed-up, firm road.
The visibility while skiing by headlamp in the actively-snowing night was challenging, as the reflections of my light on the snowflakes made seeing difficult, but I managed alright. After letting Logan catch up one last time near the end of the switchbacks, I shot ahead to the car to get ahead of the curve on de-gearing, since taking ski boots off and all that takes a little more time. Overall, my car-to-car time was about 3:45. Not super fast, but not terrible either. My timing on the final car-dash ended up working pretty well too, we were ready to go at just about the same time 😃 Most importantly, we finished just "early" enough to grab some dinner on the way home, which was much nicer than having to get drive-thru and crash at night.
I might not call this an amazing destination, but it is safe, easy, and works well for someone working out the kinks in their first touring setup, anyone looking for a stormy-day peak or bad-avy-conditions peak in the winter, or for the bolder, you can try to link it up with other peaks nearby. For myself, I was just happy to get SOMETHING in this rather difficult month, given all the conditions issues, beta issues, and work/life issues I've had as of late. Hopefully this is a sign of getting back on the horse.