Wapta Icefields Traverse

I had last week off as reading break from university, which was welcome as the first part of this semester had begun to tire a little after a great month off at Christmas with friends and family. Before I arrived in Calgary, last summer I did some preliminary reading on the classic mountaineering objectives in the area and compiled a short informal list of stuff that I'd like to do out here, the first thing that sat quite highly in the ranking was the Cascade ice route above Banff which I managed to knock off in January with some friends from the UK, so with a week off I figured that it was time to cross another one of these of the lists, and what better than a traverse of the Wapta Ice-fields.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the route its a hut to hut ski mountaineering route, often touted as Canada equivalent and competitor to the European Chamonix - Zermatt Haute route. The Wapta Icefields sit in the central ranges of the Rocky mountains on the western side of the Ice-fields Parkway. The route is linear moving southwards so requires you to do a car shuttle on either the first or last day. We took 4 days over the traverse, but missed out the Peyto hut due to hearing that the approach had a significant section of boot packing on it, and nobody really likes carrying their skis. Instead we began with an approach to the Bow hut, then a day ascending Mt Olive and getting to the Balfour hut, a day traversing the Balfour high col to the Scott Duncan hut and then on the final day we took the Sherbrook Lake ski out exit down to the West Lake Louise lodge.

The skiing on the route is for the most part fairly easy, with the hardest section being skiing the glades and canyon on the ski out. The glaciers are also fairly tame with no significant objective dangers apart from the ascent to the Balfour High Col, this section certainly warrants the party roping up and moving fairly fast as some big serac bands hang above the route, this danger can be lessened to a degree by taking the lower glacier route but while be objectively a little safer this is more crevassed and demands more attention to navigation. We were lucky and had fine weather for 3 days of the trip so navigation on this section or any of the other was never a problem, I could imagine in worse conditions though it could get very tricky. In case of this, and in addition to a map and compass, I carried a GPS with relevant waypoints programmed in, many other up there also seemed to be taking this precaution.

I used the 'Alpine Ski Tours in the Canadian Rockies' guidebook to plan the trip, along with articles I read on the internet. The map which seemed best to support these was Murray Toft's 'Ski Touring on the Wapta Ice-fields' which has the routes and huts marked as well as some helpful photographs detailing the best lines to take. I found this map elusive in Calgary, even MEC didn't stock it but I fortunately managed to pick up a copy in Banff at Mountain Magic for $23 - not super cheap but its printed on nice waterproof and tear resistant paper so if you look after it you should only have to buy one.

I did the tour with two friends of mine from Calgary; Meg a telemark skier, and Dena, a climber and alpine skier who is fast developing a passion for the backcountry. Everything went to plan and we achieved guidebook time on all of the day. Theres a video below that follows our trip, and a set of photos in my Picasa gallery that is linked above in the tabs. If I have some time I may write more narrative entry about the trip later in the week, but we'll see.