Thar Peak (North Couloir) - January 21 2023

Anderson River Group, Coquihalla, British Columbia
1940m

After a week or two of a lot of skiing and a lot less peakbagging, I decided this pattern could not stand, and that this weekend would be the one to buck the trend. My mom was in town and wanted to ski, and specifically wanted to use the good weather on Sunday to do it, so Saturday was de facto chosen as the bagging day. I'd had my eye on the Coquihalla area all week, as the avy forecast was 1-1-1 and had basically zero slide activity reported. I hit up my buddies, and Logan was down to clown. We settled on Thar Peak (clearly), and originally were thinking of traversing from it west toward Zopkios Peak, but instead decided to take a greater advantage of good conditions to attempt the North Couloir on Thar instead, which would take longer, so we left the traverse as an optional extra if we had time+energy after the much more difficult ascent. I crashed at my Grandma's in West Van Friday night to lessen the drive a bit, woke up at 4am, and set out at about 5:30.

After picking Logan up, a bathroom break on the drive, getting there, then gearing up, we set out just after 8:30, parking at the end of Falls Lake Road, which was well-plowed if still snowy. I brought my skis as this area has a ton of mapped ski routes, and Logan snowshoed since he is still at the beginning of his ski career inbounds. It was also annoyingly cold at the car, so I ended up wearing my fleece even though I normally try to "start cold", justifying it by saying "the couloir will be steep and slow anyways".

The first 900m to the lake were pretty uneventful. We spent some time noting the abundance of bridges and the very strange-looking "skin track" that we followed, and got through the treed trail in about 20 minutes. Upon arriving at the lake, we found the faintest traces of a skin track across, but for all intents and purposes we'd have to be the first ones crossing since the last snowfall, which is always fun. Thankfully some basic pole-probing felt pretty good, and we were across in about 15 minutes intact and dry.

Getting from the lake at 1300m to the ridge at 1900m was the challenge for the rest of the day, and with 0 tracks to follow and a steep slog ahead, we took a pretty calm, measured pace. The beginning was pretty slow as we gauged the snowpack, making ski cuts, pressuring convexities, etc. We also had a few conversations about the debris we saw at the bottom of the couloir, which was quite substantial. In the end, though, we concluded that we felt comfortable ascending, so that's what we did. The snow was a pretty even mix of debris, hard wind-scoured crusty, and soft wind deposited snow in the open area below the couloir proper, so traversing up was a bit slow dealing with the variable snow. The debris, especially, was difficult to navigate efficiently, so we spent a lot of time weaving unconventional paths up the ever-steepening slope.

Around the point where the above picture was taken, we (mostly I) decided that skinning up in the variable, steep snow wasn't really worthwhile since it was so supportive. I suggested it would be a good time for a change into crampons, and so we did at about 1450m. This was the right call, as the snow as quite supportive, getting steeper by the metre, and skis were somewhat unwieldy in the hard+steep stuff. In about 2 hours after leaving the car, we got ourselves up to 1500m, where the slope angle was about 40 degrees according to my phone.

The next 2 hours were uneventful, if tiring. It was just a march up the ever-steepening chute, with occasional breaks as we swapped trail-breaking duties, but not much going on otherwise. The first half of this leg was pretty good, with supportive snow pretty easy to find, but the second half got slower as we started running lower on good snow (for uphill travel, anyway), with an unfortunate amount of sections where we were more "swimming" up than climbing. Below is a smattering of pictures from this leg of the journey. This brought us up to 1780m, just over 120m from the ridge.

After 1800m, things constricted further, and encounters with ice and rock increased notably. At about 1870m we encountered the crux of the route, a narrow few metres of steep ice with one way up, as the sides were cliff or just smooth, hard rock. With crampons and an ice tool, I found it to be fairly simple and secure, as I gained good purchase in the ice with those. If you lack faith in frontpointing with your crampons, or in the pick of your axe/tools, you may find this to be overwhelming. Logan followed through with just an axe (though a somewhat curved "hybrid" type), and we both found it to be more "fun and exciting" as some of our first ice->pick contact rather than problematic.

Shortly after that, we got to another flat spot, and took a break there to figure out our plan for the final push. The standard route goes up in the same direction (south) to the ridge, and looked fairly tame (relative to the rest of the ascent). There was, however, a tighter, steeper couloir to climber's left which also happened to be the direction of the peak. After some debate, we decided since the "point" of the day was doing a "cooler" ascent instead of just getting the peak the easy way, that we'd try this alternative chute and see if it would get us there.

While for most of the trip we'd been trading off trailbreaking fairly evenly and kept an agreeable pace for each other, around 1850m or so Logan started tapering off in energy, so I took the lead from that point up into the "extra couloir", so-to-speak. Once we got into it, it immediately upped the stoke levels, as the narrow and steep nature made me, at least, feel like this was some "real mountaineering". Logan got encouraged enough to try breaking trail again, but after a couple minutes of struggling with some softer snow, we swapped again as apparently my cereal and banana at 4:30am were still putting in work for my body. I think once it started getting steep and icy enough having the ice tool was helpful for me as well, poles were very much useless at this slope angle, and had been for some time.

The first half of the couloir was pretty business as usual, nothing really to note about it. Once we got to the second half, though, things started getting spicier. It was also about 2:00pm at this point, so we were both pretty sure we'd not be doing any sort of traversing, and also keeping an eye on things to ensure we were at least out of any complex terrain by darkness. It was snowing throughout the afternoon, but not intensely enough to pose more than an annoyance.

I picked a line through the line in the first picture of the pair above (climber's left), which was a tight squeeze between shallow/not buried rocks on the left and the large boulder on the right, but just enough ice in the middle to give solid purchase. Conditions are definitely finicky here, and you need the stars to line up to get through, more/less of ice or snow could make or break things here.

Logan struggled up the snow below this section for a few minutes before I got cold and needed to move again, so I turned my attention toward the next obstacle in front of me: a hodgepodge of rock, ice, and tree/bush.

Getting up that was... interesting. It was difficult enough to have a couple committing moves, and steep enough that if I misplaced an axe and it bounced back sharply, it could send me backwards. I did a lot of digging/testing with my crampons and tools before deciding on a route up. The actual going up took a few seconds, but it felt pretty intense, if one rated mixed climbing on a scrambling scale, I'd say it was probably class 4.

Unfortunately, it was around here where things went a bit more poorly. Logan took a really long time getting up the 10 metres before the first ice pitch, and didn't seem to be getting as good traction (or perhaps just had less trust) with his axe in the ice once he got in, so progress was slow. Worse, upon discussing the difficulties of the harder "class 4 equivalent" mixed bit I had gone up, he decided to up, confident in his ability to do so. However, he slipped partway up, and fell down to the top of the first ice section, though he managed to arrest himself and avoid injury, thankfully. He felt confident that he could rectify the mistake, and tried again a few minutes later, but once again lost traction, and this time tumbled down below the icy parts into the snowier slope. He also dropped his axe above where he landed in the process. It was quite scary, but thankfully he remained physically unscathed, if a little mentally shooketh, as the kids say.

After confirming that trying to go up a third time was definitely not the right way to go about things, I went up the last little bit to see if this route would get us anywhere useful, and if there might be an easier way down for me than backtracking. I crested the ridge with relative ease, and found... the summit about 5 metres above me, but totally inaccessible. To me left on the ridge was a VERY steep dropoff, in front was an unclimbable face (at least with my skill level and no protection), and to my right was... maybe an easier way down. I decided I'd try to descend that way, as I could slowly pick my way down the route I took up, but it wouldn't be fun or easy.

The way down to Logan was definitely easier for the most part, although I spent probably 4 minutes contemplating my life choices when I was faced with a 2-foot drop to get to what was otherwise very easy, snowy terrain. I instead traversed across the slope seen below to skier's right, and rejoined the gully I ascended, but below the second, more difficult mixed section. I was also able to retrieve Logan's dropped axe from this point, which made things MUCH easier going forward (or going backward, I guess, since we were going back down the couloir).

That whole ordeal between me getting up the second obstacle and returning back below them to Logan took about 45 minutes, so that burned quite a bit of daylight. The downclimb down the couloir started pretty slow, as Logan was a bit weary (understandably) from his previous experiences. Interestingly, he was using the controversial and rare technique I employ when scrambling of facing outward from the slope, whilst I was downclimbing traditionally, which was an interesting role reversal. After a few minutes of slow progress, I suggested he try my (which is kinda his, in a sense) method, which he seemed more comfortable with, and we got back out of the extra couloir at about 3:40pm.

From there, we both agreed the short ascent to the ridge and heading down the mellow slopes of the south face would be a much better strategy than going down the steep couloir given our small party and Logan's lack of skis, even if the snow was feeling very good. So up we went, 10 minutes later we were on the ridge, where we found a rap station (not a fixed rope @Alan Blair, don't worry, you don't have to slog up here to fix that).

On the ridge, I asked Logan if he wanted to just rest, start heading down, or if he'd like to bag the peak still, as I certainly still planned on doing so, and he felt good enough to do so, so up we went. It was about a fifteen minute bootpack for us, but it'd be a lot shorter if you kept your floatation of choice on your feet, as while we weren't sinking to our knees, it was also not a hard firn. We took some well-earned summit photos, then went back to our packs to eat/drink (well at least Logan, I was playing it safe w/ respect to eating due to some digestive instability as of late) and gear up for the descent.

As we geared up for the descent, I noticed that the heel of one of my bindings had kinda, well, broken. Not in a disastrous way, but the plastic "tab" that you push on and pull up to put it in touring/downhill modes and to pop out of downhill mode had broken, and there was only a thin bit left to manipulate. That was annoying, as these (Fritschi Tecton) were not cheap and otherwise had been pretty great to me. Hopefully I can get that warrantied or something, as I didn't do anything unusual to them, and this isn't the only thing that's gone wrong with them (had some issues keeping the brakes up for a while in touring mode, and also the little plastic plate in the toe that fixed the old boot-denting problem is loose in one of the toes). So for anyone looking for gear recommendations, durability isn't a strong suit for these IMO. They do ski great and have pretty low weight for their prowess, though.

Once we got ourselves geared up, we started heading down at around 4:30pm. With sunset at about 5pm, I wanted to get to the road in that time, although while that would be easy for me, that would be a much bigger challenge for Logan. The Nak Bowl run, which we actually stayed a bit skier's left of the whole time, was pretty fun. The top half had tons of open space for powder turns, good snow quality, and was still mellow enough to be comfortable for me to open things up a bit, and I am definitely not what I'd consider to be an expert skier, far from it.

Logan kept a good pace for the first traverse section across toward the bowl from the top, but once we started going down, it was apparent he was pretty gassed. Aside from just "walking slower than he normally would", he decided to take the not-actually-faster method of sliding down some of the bigger slopes, even though an energized person could snowshoe down substantially faster and with less techincal challenge. After having to deal with unwiedly skis in the couloir up, it did feel kinda nice to be advantaged for this part.

Getting through the trees was, at times, a bit difficult, but I managed without any major incident or accidental tree-hugging. Perhaps being right on the run would've helped, but I didn't see a large amount of popularity for it on Trailforks, and when I did eventually get myself right over it, it turned out to be a nasty creek depression which was much worse than the terrain I left to get there. I'd say probably don't bother hunting for greener grass below 1600m, just go for whatever terrain looks good and deal with the forest as it comes to you. Or do super-thorough route research to ensure you get awesome skiing if that's your jam. For me, though, skiing is more of a bonus on the trip, than the priority, so I didn't really feel concerned about doing that.

We picked our way down slowly until about 5:40 when it got actually dark enough that I took the headlamp out. Unfortunately, while I'm sure I could get my googles and it on at the same time, that is more effort than I was willing to expend, so instead I got my face snowed on for the sake of light from that point on. We did get most of the way to the pipeline road, though, and also picked up a good few tracks, so I was happy we managed to get to easily-navigable terrain before the dark set in.

Another 5 minutes brought us to the road, where we were greeted with an open creek, and then a 1.5km slog back to the car.

I walked with Logan for a bit along the road, but after a bit we decided given how skis glide and all, it'd be more efficient for me to just use the features of my skis as intended, and get to the car earlier so I could de-gear, clear the snow off the car, etc. before he got there to expedite our departure, as I had to be up early the next day to ski w/ my family and it was over a 3 hour drive back home.

The first just under a kilometre of the road is pretty flat, if your skins are nice and dry I'd probably slap em on and skin that section, it's worth it. I didn't bother, though, and it was "fine". The second half is actually downhill, I skied myself out to the car. There's a fork in the road just before the parking where you can stay high and go right, which is likely the easiest route. However, I decided to take the more popular route and follow the creek. Well, mostly, as I found myself on skier's left of the creek which turned into survival skiing a bit, but it was still better than walking, and pretty fast too. I got to the car at about 6:15pm, degeared, and got the car cleaned up, as a decent amount of snow had fallen.

Logan clearly was not having a fun time, as I'd expected him to show up as I finished my OCD packing up and car-cleaning, but he took another 20 minutes or so after that, moving pretty slowly. Apparently on the road back his ankle which had a history of not being perfect, but had been good for the last few months was acting up again, and he was not having a very fun time. He did truck on through it though, and we got ourselves pointed down the road at about 7:00.

On the way back I finally got to drive the infamous Coquihalla in winter, which was a bit underwhelming, as it seemed to me like any other unplowed mountain highway in the winter (which is what I expected). Thankfully my snow tires were very effective, and we got down without any drama, stopped in Chilliwack to get some calories in me before driving for a few more hours (also gas), then we got ourselves home.

Overall, quite a satisfying trip, taking the "fun" route up was pretty rewarding, and getting to finally use one of my ice tools was also pretty rad. If conditions allow, 10/10 would recommend (although I would suggest not taking our extra credit detour, as it's a bit sketchy and doesn't actually get you to the summit anyway).

GPX Track + Map