Black Prince

I headed out to Black Prince, a popular backcountry ski area down in Kananaskis with Trevor yesterday. We had fantastic weather with great if perhaps a touch warm.

Black Prince is located off Highway 40, about 50 minutes from Calgary, and a maybe 35-40 from Canmore. The slopes that are usually skied sit below the mountains from which they take their name, a winter ascent on skis isn't listed in the ski guide and I don't know if its in the Alpine routes guide, but it would make a good objective especially for the summer. You skin straight out of the car park crossing the basin towards the slopes, following the river. Once you reach the slopes their are few options, we followed the hiking trail which had a nice skin track from a party before us up and then broke out onto the ridge through the gradually thinning trees until we reached the tree-line. This is about 5km and 4-500m of ascent In good snow stability conditions you could continue further up the ridge to get a longer descent but due to the warm temperatures and high category we choose to stick to the relative safety of the trees.

Snug trees on the descent of Black Prince.

The descent is lovely at the top with fairly open glades where you can get some nice wide turns with the slope probably sitting about 25-30 degrees. The snow was a lot better than we expected (I was pretty worried driving through the upper Kananaskis valley as it has lost most of its snow), I sank to my thighs a few times when I stepped of my skis - not glorious fresh champagne powder but good enough for us. The guidebook dosen't give much information as to the distribution of the trees across the drainage and I think we got sucked into following some other people's ski tracks and ended up skiing some pretty tight trees towards the bottom. Eventually the slope will spit you out at the river, depending on where this happens you might be able to get a clean run onto the trail and back down to the car park, unfortunately we were a bit to far to skier's right for this so had a done skins for a quick ascent over the ridge before the final down.

Again I was using Chic Scott's 'Alpine Ski Tours: Summits & Icefields in the Canadian Rockies' which I found to be a good aid.

Back to Trevor's in the evening for some beer, steaks on the BBQ and the chance to get a fresh coat of wax on my skis for free!