Tonic Peak - November 12 2023

Squamish-Cheakamus Divide, Whistler, BC
1803m

After a couple of rather pathetic attempts at early-season skiing at Black Mountain and Morton Peak, the weather gods finally decided to smile upon us and dump some proper snow in the sea to sky! Unfortunately, they didn't smile upon me, as it was also a weekend I was on-call, so I spent the first day of this powder weekend sitting at home, working while staring at webcams and snow stakes all day. I was determined to not waste this golden opportunity, though, so I scoured the Telus coverage map, found a place I could go and get signal the whole time, and scrounged a plan together. It seems that this dumping was enough to get my ski buddy Nick out of hibernation, so he was in for the fun. Logan was feeling confident based on his resort training last season, and had some new "proper" touring skis to try out, and Nick had a couple other friends who wanted to get into touring, as they had pretty much checked all the other outdoor boxes (skiing, mountain biking, hiking, etc), so we had a full on party set up.

We planned to meet in Squamish at 7:30 for the 8:30 gate time at Whistler Olympic Park. While we didn't want to park there, it was our third/backup option, and we didn't want to waste time sitting around if that became necessary. Plus the day wasn't supposed to be long, so it was fine starting then anyways. We ended up getting moving closer to 8, but we were rewarded with our first plan, driving up Callaghan Creek FSR being a success! I was worried it would be gated, since the official site for such things says so, but the wording also made it sound more like they meant Callaghan Lake FSR, which turned out to be right. So, I took lead with Nick's 2 buddies following in their Jeep (amusingly the much more capable vehicle), and we made our way up.

The main FSR was devoid of snow, and also a decently-maintained mainline, any vehicle should be able to drive here. We forked off of the road here, and started to climb a rougher-looking spur. It was still doable without concern in my crossover, but I'd say medium clearance with not-terrible angles should be enough, and 2WD can probably get you by. In winter, though, AWD and/or snow tires would be a good plan. As we got higher, we started hitting snow, though we had tracks to follow, so it wasn't too worrying. At 1000m, there was a flat area where the road forks, and that's where normally I'd have been forced to call it quits and start skinning. However, we had a second vehicle, and a Jeep Wrangler no less! So, we swapped positions, and they broke trail until they were no longer comfortable, gaining us an enormous 15m extra before calling it, and we parked 😃. Even if it was short, it was nice having a second vehicle, allowing us to push things a bit more.

As we geared up, we had a few things to go over with a bunch of people having new gear, and some just being new to touring at all. To put how much I wasn't in a rush into perspective, I made the choice to bring my new resort powder skis, which are rather heavy and equipped with even heavier frame bindings, along with my burly resort boots and my laptop in case work called, thinking "oh new people are slow, I should be able to handle it, and that way I get nice stuff for the down, and can suck up the new" (more on that later). So, after getting everything in order, we started out just after 9:30am.

The general plan was to follow this unnamed spur road up to 1500m, where the terrain starts to open up and then basically just follow the best terrain up to and along the ridge until the top. We didn't have much beta on going in from this side, or to the top of tonic (Gin and Sproatt to either side get more traffic), but satellite photos showed the road from space, and we had some evidence that people did ski at least most of the way, so I was pretty confident things would work out.

The road started out pretty deep, enough to be skiable without concern of sharks or anything right off the bat. It was also deep, heavy, and right at the car, a bit wet too. The first few steps let me know that my decision to retry using frame bindings (I'd previously noted how terribly heavy they were when I started touring, and promptly got a real touring setup, but figured that might've just been poor form and inexperience making them seem awful) was going to be a painful one, as they felt more than 2x as heavy, and each step was way harder than with lighter skis, bindings, and boots. Oh well, though, we had a casual day which was more so "touring and hanging out, and there happens to be a peak at the end", so it wasn't a huge deal. Within a few minutes, the wetness started to go away, and the powder only got deeper, making me and Nick smile effusively.

There was a brief moment of panic when, about 10 minutes in, Logan stopped and noticed that he had forgotten his helmet in the car, Thankfully it was close enough, and he was fit enough that I just gave him the keys, and we continued on knowing he could catch up pretty quickly. After that short break, it was back to suffering up the deep powder for me. I had originally planned to break trail the entire day as a test of my own mettle, but after about 150m of vert, I noticed how tired I was getting, and while I certainly could tough it out, it wouldn't be to the advantage of the group to do so, so we started swapping trail-breaking duties, as I preferred doing so down low where the terrain was just "follow the road" vs higher up where there were actual terrain decisions to make, where I was most comfortable being in front.

After 75 minutes, we'd made paltry gains up to 1250m, where there was a small viewpoint that we took a couple photos of the Brandywine Group. Logan had rejoined us by this point, and group spirits were still rising as the snow just kept getting deeper and drier. I normally consider forest road descents a chore, but we were all stoked to ride down such perfect snow.

We continued to go on, with me and Logan doing most of the trail-breaking past this point (as we were the actual peakbaggers of the group used to such suffering). The road continued, with not much of note other than "the trees were not ready to be skied yet" until 1500m, where the road forked into a variety of spurs and trails, and we stopped for a break, now 2:20 into the day.

After about 15 minutes, we continued on up, now following the "With a Twist" mountain bike trail (more or less), as it offered enough "not tree" to be skinnable, and a decent grade for a skin track. There were one or two steep spots that required some intensive skinning to get up, but it wasn't too bad, and in another hour we gained... a whole 100m up to the ridge. Going was slow as new skinners learned how to deal with steeper terrain, and we were all going kinda slow due to being not big uphill travellers, breaking trail, definitely regretting our heavy gear choices (wonder who that could be), etc.

Once we were on the ridge, there was a good amount of undulation until we dropped to the Sproatt Cabin (not publicly accessible, for those wondering) and got to make our final summit climb. Not too far in, Nick's 2 friends said they actually had a prior dinner commitment we weren't originally aware of, and intended to split off and go back to their car. They were quite confident in their ability to follow the track back, and the terrain was inconsequential as long as they did so, so they headed back with plenty of time to spare, and even left us a couple drinks on the dash (thanks guys!). The remaining 3 of us (me, Nick, and Logan) were left to contend with a moral dilemma: "do we rip our skins and lock our boots/bindings for a 10m descent, or do we keep them on to save time"? Normally I'd not even question it, and just keep them, but the slope was steep enough that it would actually count as "real skiing" and I wasn't sure if I could succeed in skin-skiing it, so we ended up having to transition, which ate up some time.

After that short time-waster, it was back to undulating skinning until we hit the hut, which ended up being over an hour-long endeavour for nearly nil in elevation progress. Other than the transition time lost and the baseline of "moving 1.5km", we also lost a good chunk of time due to Logan's skins starting to fail. During the transition, I think he let em get a little snowy, and once it was time to put them back on, the glue was compromised, and things weren't sticking anymore. There was also a loose rivet that allowed his tip clips to rotate while putting them on, which probably didn't help. It took a while to try and dry em off and ski-strap em down enough to get by. Eventually, though, we made it to the hut at a late-but-not-terrible 2:20pm.

From there, we got to about 1730m in about half an hour, still not going very fast. Logan was having more skin problems, and Nick was officially tired/in too much pain to continue (he's recovering from an injury, and was testing how long he could go before swelling would force him to stop, guess we found the answer). Given it was nearly 3pm, and sunset was 4:30, we agreed I could push for the summit quickly and rejoin, Nick kept a radio so I could talk to him, and Logan could come up if he fixed his skins in the next 5 minutes, but otherwise due to the time finally catching up with us, we had to start making calls with that in mind. The terrain wasn't really consequential, but still, none of us really preferred skiing out in the dark, or having a super-late night.

I ground up the last ~70m in about 15 minutes, helped by both urgency and slightly firmer snow, at least for some of the way up. I probably didn't take the most efficient route due to not being able to see what would that might be, but it worked well enough, and I got to soak in all 0 of the views at the top before starting my transition. I was somewhat dismayed, to be honest, when I checked-in and Nick told me Logan was following me up, as I knew the transition would take longer, and more notably, I was a bit worried about his ability to ski in the poor vis, but that was his call, and I was hoping that the months of skiing practice he'd had since we last went out together were about to bear fruit.

Logan joined me at the top as I was getting my transition done with, and after 15 total minutes up top, we started heading down. The skiing was quite careful due to the bad vis, and us taking a different route down to avoid having to do any regain along the few summit-candidate bumps we traversed to get to the top. It may not have been very fast, but I'll credit Logan with only wiping out twice, I believe, before we met back up with Nick. It took the same amount of time to get down as it did to get up, but it felt faster, at least. The snow was awesome, and I enjoyed some sweet turns, especially as we got lower and the clouds got less dense.

After we got down to 1650m or so, it was back to undulation, so the skins came back on, and things started to slow down. Logan had recurring skin trouble, necessitating a few breaks to deal with that, and I guess maybe was having issues adapting to skiing down with skins on (admittedly not the most fun endeavour), which resulted in a few falls, whose time hit adds up. It took 35 minutes to get from 1650 to depart the cabin, which included one ski/skin cycle, but was still a pretty painful pace with our goal of trying to get off the ridge by dark looming in our minds.

Once we left the cabin, at least, we knew it was skins on "until it wasn't" for the rest of the day, so that was nice. Skin issues continued to be a problem, though, and there were a few long waits (~10 minutes for a couple of the worst ones) during the ridge walk, which took about an hour from hut to our skin-ripping point. Headlamps were donned near the end of the ridge, and we were very happy to finally get to rip our skins once we got to that point.

We finally got to start skiing down "for real" at about 5:40pm, with Nick leading, Logan in the middle, and me bringing up the rear. We made rather slow progress down, taking about 40 minutes to reach the 1500m mark where the road ended and the bike trail started. I think Logan definitely learned the hard way whether or not his resort training had paid off yet 😅, and me+Nick learned just how much undulation there was that we didn't realise on the way up. I especially struggled with any small uphills, since I didn't want to run into anyone, and as such didn't gain much speed, and then paid the price when trying to go up these hills with slippery factory-wax on the new+heavy skis. Oh well, it still beats walking 😃.

Sadly, once we got down to 1500m, what we were waiting for all day (500m of nearly untouched pow on a road wide enough to make some tight slalom turns) turned into quite a nightmare: a road totally carved up by snowmobiles who weren't even courteous enough to keep to one track to the side, but instead just carved the whole road up haphazardly, and without the decency to at least do it early enough to break the trail for us on the way up! That kinda dampened the mood, but we still had to get down, so off we went.

The conditions weren't honestly great for anyone, and there were a couple small uphill sections that had to be walked which sucked some time+energy out of us, but Logan especially struggled to find the right balance of speed vs control, and paid the price with a good amount of extra walking and falling, depending on which side of the equation was imbalanced. Nick is a way better skier than me, and is overall less injured still, so he was of course having no problem. I was solidly in the "this is annoyingly effort, and not really that fun", but I still could at least descend faster than walking.

Once we finally arrived at the car, about 10 hours after we left (did not expect that on a day with only 900m of gain, using skis), we were fairly wet and a little miserable, but managed to get packed up and down fast enough to have a nice dinner in town before the guys headed back to the city. Overall, I expected the day to have some ups and downs with newer people and whatnot, but it still managed to exceed my expectations, just unfortunately not in the direction I was hoping for. I'm glad we did it on this mountain (specifically rather low-consequence, not too long+high, cell service friendly, etc), so this being on my "good peaks for starting out list" was a success, if nothing else. My frame binding experiment was not, those shall remain relegated to slackcountry only going forward 😅, I think Logan will need some more resort time before the next ski outing, and I think I owe Nick a ski tour with a little more skiing and a little less suffering next time 😃.

GPX Track + Map

Bonus Trip!

After the sufferfest above, where the amazing snow was somewhat dampened by bad vis, forced slow travel, and sleds ruining things, I wanted to remedy that the next day. I was going to try to climb Rainbow, but got nope-d at the gate because apparently "they haven't opened backcountry access yet" because "patrol isn't ready, etc", even though they don't patrol the backcountry, and all Olympic Park does is provide a parking spot... With that nixed, I tried to go for Cloudburst instead, but once I got to the Cloudburst Branch off of Chance Creek FSR, I found a deactivation, so I had to hike in until it was skinnable. After 20 minutes of exploring, I found that I had to wrap around to the side approachable from branch 200 (accessed from the Squamish Valley, too far of a drive for me so late in the day), take the south slopes from branch 100 (same problem, and also the north side seems to have way more traffic on trailforks, presumably for a reason), or somehow bash through some rather thick looking new-growth in the middle of where the road was supposed to continue. I remain unsure as to whether or not people just wait for the snowpack to be way deeper, or if there's a bushwhack I wasn't aware of on this route, but I didn't feel like trying to screw around to find out, so I decided to do a rather non-Tareef like thing and "just go skiing".

So, I went up to the Diamond Head trailhead in Squamish, and decided to just enjoy some skiing at Round Mountain, knowing that there would be no sleds to ruin the fun this time! I summited it last spring, so I had no summit pressure, and could just go as far as time, energy, and good skiing permitted, so I was in it just for a good time, and a little redemption after the underwhelming skiing the previous night. I took a casual pace up, 2 hours to get to 1600m from the 957m parking, with 15 lost to swapping from shoes to skis along the trail (could not skin from the car), and probably another 15 lost to just "dealing with my skins getting snowy and losing their glide" (was just at the edge of being annoying enough to break out the skin wax, but I didn't quite cross the threshold). My reward was a decent workout, and finally some good skiing.

This was a much more pleasurable outing, I skinned right up without much drama, ripped my skins (this time I brought lighter boots and real touring skis, so much nicer), and never touched em again. I skied down to 1350m in powder, and the rest on "basically a groomer", the typical snow conditions of Red Heather/Paul Ridge. I only stopped because I was tired, I was giving people beta, or because the snow ended and I had to pack my skis up and go back into my trail runners I stashed on the trail. This time, 500m of descent took under 30 minutes, a much more fun pace. Sadly Nick wasn't able to join for the redemption, as his ankle needed some more recovery time, but at least he got to live vicariously through me?