Opal Cone (failed) - November 11 2022

Garibaldi Névé, Squamish, British Columbia

After a week spent hiding indoors despite the great weather and snow after Metal Dome, I was determined to get some things done this week. Since I had Friday off, I was hoping to get some extra value by doing something then and Sunday with some rest in between. I also happened to finally meet my new neighbour earlier in the week trying to fix a broken garage door, and it turns out he's a splitboarder, and we made plans to try and tackle Opal Cone! We had the most convenient morning meetup ever at 6am, and carpooled up to the Diamond Head parking at Garibaldi Park.

Thankfully, the road was a bit snowy but well-packed and ploughed for a dirt road, so it was no problem. I had chains as per the requirement, but we didn't put them on since nobody was there, and, well, that's really tedious and time-consuming. We got up no issue (definitely need snow tires, though, as the road will remain snow-covered until the melt, you can't fully plough a dirt road and they don't salt it afaik). After some time spent gearing up, we got started at 7:07am, a bit late but it also meant we got to have some amount of meaningful sleep, and didn't need headlamps to start the day, which was nice.

I was a bit worried about pace with someone new, as my middling speed makes it plausible someone might be faster or slower, but we managed to find a good pace, and made it up to Red Heather in 1:10, which was a pleasant surprise, as I expected a 50% increase from my summer time when I was last here. The skinning was easy on a well-packed and smooth trail, with only leaves but no rocks or roots in the way. The snow on the sides of the trail seemed to be fairly fluffy too, which had us excited.

Once we got past the hut, the wide, obvious track split up into many routes. Some people just turn around at the hut, some go to various ski lines up to Paul Ridge, some to Round Mountain... so there is a lot of stuff to choose from. Ensure you check your map and follow the track you intend, or at least one that goes the right way if choosing the best-broken trail. There was a good skin track leading on the summer route (leads past a couple avalanche-capable hills past Round Mountain, but has lower elevation waste than the winter route which goes on the far side of the peak and takes a bit longer), and we were pretty happy with the snow conditions so we took the path of least resistance.

We followed a narrower (probably only a couple parties had gone to the lake before us) but still appreciated skin track to Elfin Lakes, which took us 2:45, a bit under my rough 3 hour estimation, so all things were looking up. Past the lakes, we followed a skin track leading toward the Saddle Trail that goes up to Diamond Head and the smaller peaks before (as well as Atwell Peak if you're a cool kid). However, once we hit the first junction (which is before the "official" junction), the track ended, and we had to break trail.

From there, Philip took the lead, and we made our way toward Opal Cone. Thankfully, though the trail wasn't broken, the gaps in the trees made it fairly obvious where to go. Sailing was pretty smooth until 12.8km in, or 3:45 into the day. This is where we found a creekbed that drains into Ring Creek which seemed to be an avy debris field with large, icy "snowlders" that we had to take our skis off to cross. That was a nice waste of half an hour, although I at least got to feel good about bringing my ice axe, as we got some use out of it chipping steps into the ice in a couple places.

Getting down to the creek was another slow ordeal, as the trail was clearly made for hikers, not skiers. I suspect in later season, one could take a steeper route down to the creek crossing to skier's right of the real route, though that bowl was steep enough to have some avy risk, which wasn't great with the day warming up, and more notably, it had questionable snow coverage, and ran out into a running creek lined by boulders. So after some waffling, we ski-shuffled as long as we could, and bootpacked through the treed section of the trail to the bridge.

The bridge, while seemingly structurally sound, was unfortunately quite narrow, our only option forward, and covered in snow. We didn't trust the snow enough to skin across, so instead we slowly went across on foot, clearing the snow with our boots/shovels until we got to hardpack we could trust. Then, we hauled our gear over, walked over some boulders on the other side, and put the skis back on. This was another major source of delay, as we were at 5:25 into the day, or about 12:30pm by the time we got across the creek. I was hoping we could summit in 3 hours past the lakes, so this was definitely a bit of a concern as we continued on.

I took on trail-breaking duty from this point, and we picked our way through the young forest and boulders making up this part of the trail. The slope to the right was steep and avalanche-prone (we could see some pinwheels falling throughout the day on this slope), but far enough away with a lower valley to our right before the slope that we weren't worried about it. The most annoying part was dealing with the boulders which made the early-season snowpack very uneven, combined with the light conditions making depth perception rather difficult.

Worse, at 1340m (yeah, you have to lose a lot of elevation to cross Ring Creek, all the way down to 1280m) I broke my streak of colitis annoyance-free trips, and had to take a bathroom break, wasting about 20 minutes and a creating a good amount of annoyance for me (thankfully Philip was quite understanding and patient about it). Once I rejoined him (he understandably went a bit ahead while I took care of business), I did at least feel comfortable eating something, which I'd been avoiding to that point, which was nice.

We continued the slow climb along the creek until about 1:45pm. At that point we were at about 1400m, with a couple kilometres left to loop around the far side of Opal Cone to get to the top, with a bit over 300m more to gain. Philip didn't want to be out in the less comfortable terrain beyond the lakes past dark, and given the slowness through the early-season obstacles we hit on the way up, we decided to turn around at this point to ensure we'd only have to deal with headlamps on the familiar terrain of the Elfin Lakes trail.

Thankfully, the way back was easier with broken tracks and cleared bridges, so we got back past all the "annoying terrain" by 3pm (just past the icy debris above the creek). From there, it was an hour-long slog back to the lakes. I was getting a bit tired at this point, having had a whole granola bar and yogurt drink since leaving home, on account of my bathroom worries and our compressed timeline. Once we got to the lakes, I had some more of my food so I had some calories to keep me going instead of just mettle.

We left the lower lake a little after 4pm, and began the long slog along Paul Ridge. I always hate this return because you don't gain/lose much of anything, but it is not flat, just a bunch of annoying undulations. It also seemed to have had a couple snowshoers use it since the morning, including a couple we saw heading to the lakes to camp, so the skin track wasn't as nice and glidey as we hoped. We mostly just toughed this one out trying to beat the sunset to a point where we could do our transition into downhill mode, so there wasn't much to note during the trek. We spent 1:10 getting ourselves to that point just in the nick of time. We stripped our skins, Philip put his board together, and we got the headlamps on at 1510m, before we started heading down in the dark 20 minutes later at about 5:40pm.

After a long day slogging on skins and not getting a peak, we were very happy to have our reward of some skiing. We spent about 35 minutes getting down from our transition point. One could definitely descend faster, but after 25km to get to that point, our legs were a bit tired for hard-charging. The descent to Red Heather was awesome, with nice, light powder slopes to be found down and past the hut until 1375m where one has to meet up with the trail. There was still lots of untouched snow left for us, though with the forecast calling for many days of no snow, the available fresh tracks will likely dwindle soon.

Once back on the main trail, it was basically a somewhat narrow east-coast style groomer with some nighttime iciness (nothing bad, just "different") down to the car. A non-tired person could yeet down in one go and get a good amount of speed. I needed some old-man breaks getting down, but it was definitely still fun, and I got to reassure myself for future trips that you can go fairly fast (traffic depending) knowing there aren't really any steep sections or extended narrow parts you'd need to worry about surprising you. There's a reason this is such a popular intro-to-backcountry area.

Once back, it felt like night, but was actually only just past 6pm (thanks winter). We packed up and drove home for some well-earned meals and rest. I wish we'd been able to get the peak, but conditions weren't great (even beyond where we stopped the snow cover didn't seem to get better as far as we could see, sadly), and we had too many roadblocks to travel efficiently. I'll have to return for revenge after a couple more storms. At least I made a new friend, though, and got some skiing in at the tail end of the day!

GPX Track + Map