Mount Sproatt - March 4 2023
Squamish-Cheakamus Divide, Whistler, British Columbia
1834m
With a week full of marginal skiing on small peaks following my latest on-call rotation, I was itching to get out to do something "real" this weekend. Looking at the forecast, I was originally going to ski Saturday inbounds and bag Sunday, but as I got closer to the day-of, I realized Saturday looked like better conditions weather-wise as long as I chose the right peak for avalanche-management, so I asked Logan if he'd want to join for both days instead of just Sunday, and found another person eager to get their first Canadian tour in who just came from overseas, and we decided to head up to Mount Sproatt, with the option to tag Tonic Peak if we were feeling it.
We managed to time the morning pretty well, and only encountered minor traffic, parking around 8am at the Rainbow Lake Trailhead off of Alta Lake road. Google wants you to go up the private road for the cemetery, but the signage pretty clearly says not to, so we were happy to park at the plowed parking area here instead. After gearing up, we got moving at 8:05am. There were surprisingly few vehicles at the trailhead, but the trail was still quite broken/packed, so clearly this is a popular area even in winter.
After a few short minutes skinning (or snowshoeing bootpacking, if your name is Logan), we found the junction where people coming from the cemetery would join/leave the hiking trail. It seemed to have more ski tracks vs our path, for whatever that is worth. I'd still not risk the potential of illegal parking, but YMMV.
Once we did meet up with that junction, the trail seemed to be more like an unplowed and untrafficked-by-vehicles forest road than a hiking trail, which is a good thing for efficient skinning and having room to both avoid traffic and control speed for the descent, so that was a pleasant surprise for me. We skinned up the road for 2.5km (including the short forest at the beginning) until we arrived at what looked like it could be an old parking lot, with a Rainbow Lake Trailhead sign of its own, and where the trail made a definite narrowing to a hiking-style trail (it also appears to be where bikes are disallowed from continuing, for those curious). This was my "favourite" efficient grade of 100m/1km for summer hiking, but as much as I'd hate to make Logan feel justified, even I felt it to be a bit slow/shallow for winter, as I felt I could've gained 260m faster with less sweating in different terrain. Though that did include a 10-minute bathroom break in the middle.
We continued on the well-broken trail for another 40 minutes, gaining 220 more metres of elevation and over 2.2km, so maintaining that gentle grade. This trail was tighter, but still quite skiable, although there were a few narrow bridges and small undulations that made travel more than thoughtless. At that 2.2km point, the GPX I'd drafted up forked off to climber's left, up the northern flanks of the mountain, whereas the broken trail continued WNW to Rainbow Lake. We'd seen a couple faint tracks a minute or two behind, so we decided to break trail up from where we were and bias ourselves a bit left to meet back up with those tracks, as long as they were sensible. This was quite effective, and ski penetration went from double to single digits once on the old skin track, which only took a few minutes of meandering to accomplish.
The next bit through the forest was a bit more notable. We saw a small bit of slide debris (sz1) on a steep slope off to the side of our skin track that was recent but looked to not be from the same day, at least. We also encountered a couple rather steep sections where the skin track was difficult enough that we had to cut a new path for ourselves. Until this point, Logan was definitely on the short end of the stick with his lack of glide, but he did make up for it nicely in these parts, as his snowshoes were able to just walk up sections where me and my fellow skier were getting some solid practice in steep kick-turns to get up. We got up to the top of the forest at about 10:20 (around 1300m elevation), where we stopped for a snack/water break (well the others did, at least, especially with my needing a bathroom break earlier, I was employing my usual "nourishment only when needed" strategy).
After about 15 minutes of rest, we continued on up, breaking out of the dense forest onto a fairly flat section, where we covered about 50m of elevation over just about a kilometre (although that was slightly exacerbated by my dropping my phone into not my pocket but the snow instead, and having to ski back and re-skin up about 240m to rectify that). As we got further along the valley, we saw that this was a pretty popular, but old skin track, as there were tons of forks coming off from the mountain on skier's left that seemed to be people's downhill tracks, but both they and our skin track were still covered in a few centimetres of fresh snow. We went until we found a fork going up that looked like a skin track, and was roughly in-line with our planned route, then started gaining elevation more in earnest (around 1350m/6.5km in).
The next just under 2 hours were spent getting ourselves to the summit. The first 300m or so of elevation were up sparse trees and rolling slopes, following some nicely-cut switchbacks from parties of days-yore. I found this grade to be more efficient than before, although we did overall slow down here. I think Logan's month off spending time with his family instead of peakbagging (honestly, what kind of priorities are those) came back to bite him a bit here, as he was tiring out earlier than I'd estimate he normally would. We gave ourselves tons of time in the day, though, so it wasn't really an issue. I called for a break around 1600m, figuring that some nourishment might do him some good, and also figuring that the trees were going to disappear soon, so doing so while we had more cover from potential wind was a good idea, as it was starting to pick up a little bit from the dead-calm of the morning.
Somewhere between 1600 and 1650m, the skin track we were following turned downhill and disappeared, so we started breaking trail once again. I definitely made sure to take my mittens and balaclava out before we set out, as the wind was picking up, we were moving slower, and it was only going to pick up at the summit, and I was quickly glad I did so. The terrain up to the top was pretty simple, and easy to pick nice routes up to avoid both avy risk and difficulty, although since we had some extra time, we did make some occasional more difficult choices to get some extra kick-turn practice in. I also got some free insight into how ski patrol does avy control, which was cool (our third works as a ski patroller in the winter, which is pretty cool). One idea I never explicitly thought about, but that makes sense when you think about it, is roping up/anchoring and doing ski cuts for bigger consequence slopes. Unlikely to be something I use (even patrollers rarely do this, as that's usually when you'd just use explosives instead), but you never know what you might encounter in the future (and I don't anticipate carrying bombs up the mountain in my future).
Around 1700m or so, maybe a bit higher, the snow went from "awesome coastal pow" to "wind-scoured hardpack with pow pockets in-between", so it was quickly apparent why the tracks we had been following turned around where they did. Thankfully we were all on the same page about going for the top first, and getting good skiing second, so we pressed on despite that. What was less fortunate was the winds picking up to "biting" levels once we got into the alpine, which made the top not quite as enjoyable as the otherwise very pleasant travel we had to that point. As such, when we topped out, we didn't spend long there, and quickly tried to get ourselves down to where we could rip our skins and get ourselves out of the wind.
We skinned from the top to about 1800m where we found a good spot to rip our skins that'd not require us to climb any hills in downhill mode, then started our transition. Logan decided to go on ahead without waiting since it was cold, and he would be slower on snowshoes anyway. Us skiers struggled in the cold wind to rip our skins and get transitioned for a few minutes, and then followed down. We saw a couple of people on the first couple turns, who we gave the beta of good skiing ending where they were to save them the hassle of the wind-swept alpine (I find most ski tourers don't have a strong peakbagging spirit), and caught up with Logan fairly quickly. Unfortunately, he seemed to have lost our tracks on his descent, and found himself below a corniced ridge on a steeper slope. We stayed high and went around, more or less following our skin track, and thankfully Logan got through without incident (given the lack of sunlight on the northern slope and the cold, cornice collapse wasn't a huge concern, but the exposure and unpleasantness of sidehilling with snowshoes didn't leave any of us particularly stress-free for those couple minutes).
As Logan made his way down the mellow slopes beyond the cornices, we started seeing a ton of traffic, probably a dozen people came up as he caught up from the above hill. This is quite a popular area, though I expected Gin to be a bit more popular given it has less of a long road approach, but then again I didn't get to see how busy that was either. It might've been even more so. It was almost entirely skiers, although we did see a couple snowshoers a bit later.
Once Logan joined up with us, we were in the best part of the descent, as it wasn't super cold+windy anymore, the wind-swept snow of the top was replaced with fresh powder everywhere, and the terrain was still basically wide-open for activities. Despite it being his first time on coastal pow, our ski patroller friend skied down with style greatly exceeding my own, though I still had loads of fun with my own less graceful skiing technique, this really is an amazing area to tour in. We brought our radios today as well, which enabled us to take a few more turns at a time and wait for Logan to catch up in safe+sheltered areas, which was a great improvement over the couple-turns-at-a-time approach I've used when with snowshoers otherwise to ensure we could still see+communicate.
We skied down in this manner until the last section before the skin track went sideways near the valley bottom, where we took the last pitch with a little speed to get across the flat section a bit, figuring we'd be pretty slow shuffling along with our poles (we didn't want to put the skins back on, and since we had time we figured why not tediously slog along with poles instead of just unlocking our heels and moving fluidly?). This turned out to be more efficient than we remembered, as it was only a couple minutes of that before we hit a good section of downhill, which we rode until 1290m or so, where we took a longer break for Logan to make up the distance we'd gained riding down the slick skin track, as it had a lot more traffic on it since the morning. We waited for about 20 minutes for Logan to make his way down, and our new friend for the day had the rest of his lunch, and I enjoyed my very comfortable seat; the snow compressed perfectly to let my legs rest at the perfect height relative to my torso when I popped out of my skis to rest. We also saw a couple parties that we saw heading up starting their way down while we waited, hopefully good motivation for Logan to take the plunge on touring gear 😂
Once Logan caught up and had a snack of his own, we continued the cat+mouse descent through the trees. We guessed that one could probably just yeet through the trees and just bear vaguely right and be fine, but the skin track was enjoyable enough, and we had 1 party member that'd definitely prefer it, so we didn't bother trying to explore the unknown terrain, and stuck to the trail for the descent, taking it a few minutes at a time. It was largely uneventful, except for my yeeting myself off a jump into a 2 metre deep hole, which was a surprise to be sure, but not a welcome one. Thankfully I wasn't going very fast and it was pretty low-consequence, but still not the most fun trying to unwedge my skis and clamber out (had to boot it, unfortunately). Our other skier lost a ski trying an alternative approach to the bridge from the morning, and had to go down a couple metres to retrieve it, but all minor stuff in good fun. The descent is overall quite simple and fun.
Except for one part, around 1100m, near the end of the trail (before it turns into a road), there's a series of small uphills which were VERY annoying to side-shuffle up on skis. We dealt with it since we had time, and also couldn't remember how many in a row there were, but it's definitely more efficient to take the skis off and bootpack here (or just ski down the trees if you know where you're going and the creeks are bridged well). That kinda sucked. It did at least give Logan some opportunity to regain ground, as snowshoeing is if nothing else much more efficient at dealing with rolling terrain as there's no transition time.
Once we regrouped, we quickly undid that as we finished the ski out to the road. Since we both remembered it being pretty flat, we radioed Logan to let him know we were going to start the trudge on the flat ground in front of us, expecting to be moving pretty slow. However, it turned out that, like earlier, it was only a couple minutes like that, then it turned into a very skiable grade for the rest of the road, and we quickly found ourselves at the building .7km from the trailhead. We waited there for 25 minutes as Logan plodded his way down the trail, but eventually decided to explore the trees between this point and the car, between the hiking trail and the cemetery road, figuring that'd slow us down a bit, and be more fun than just waiting and eventually taking more skin track down.
Since that was only a few hundred metres from the car, it was only about 5 minutes of skiing, but it was fun, so definitely the right call. We got to the car, de-geared, and got ourselves prepped while Logan finished the road (long, fairly flat trails/roads are his least favourite kind of terrain, he prefers masochistically yeeting up the steeps with no approach to mellow it out), then had a relatively congestion-free drive home.
Definitely a fun peak, and an excellent winter objective for skiers and snowshoers alike (although I can' recommend the former enough). Plus if you have a group all in "peakbagging shape" with skis to make the descent faster as a bonus, you can easily link up Tonic and even that unnamed peak beside Gin (we decided not to do that, which I wasn't too upset about. It's nice to have some mellow peaks in your back pocket when friends getting into touring want to step away from the resort, which is something I've struggled with whilst trying not to repeat peaks). The conditions were also excellent, so I'm quite glad we got out, as the next day's visibility was absolutely horrendous, and you can't have a weekend without at least 1 peak checked off, after all.