Ski Tour to Elfin Lakes Campground

Day 0

we travelled from Victoria to Vancouver with a really full car, realising we didn’t have (and needed) chains for the car, there were some last minute calls to places in Vancouver that would sell chains. Curtis had odd sized tires that needed a specific size of chain (found some at a canadian tire.)

When we arrived at my parents place, Art went to the workshop to do some last minute boot adjustments (with an angle grinder).

With alarms set for 5:30, we had a relatively early bedtime.

Day 1

We woke up to coffee and pancakes, and then headed out to the trailhead. We stopped to drop off some freezer for Pat/Katelyn who just had their second kid.

There was a “chains required beyond this point” sign. We were chaining up as park rangers turned up to do the same.

It turned out we were doing our trip during “Avalanch Awareness Week”.

Squamish Search and Rescue were at the trailhead, quizzing people on their preparedness, they deamed us “well prepared” and gave us the literal thumbs up.

thumbs up

We toured up to the subalpine, where there’s a little shelter at red heather meadows. The park rangers had beat us there, and setup a little booth to quiz us on avalanche knowledge.

They had raffle prizes, and I won a headlamp.

After the games and lunch, we continued our tour up into the alpine, around Round Mountain, and hit a point where we were breaking trail through a fair amount of fresh powder. Excellent skiing snow, terrible trail breaking snow. We were pretty beat by the time we arrived at camp.

Day 2

As we went to bed, we decided on a 6:30am alarm. We got up at 7:30 slowly because nobody set the alarm. The sun was up, and we had a nice breakfast, and then packed up camp. Clouds broke for great views before we left camp at a very leasurly 11am.

Several parties had tamped down the trail since we broke it, so it was much easier on the way out.

Decent

Turns were fun in great conditions in red heather.

Got to the car, and left the parking lot at 3:30pm, which got us to the ferry at 6:25pm (5min before the reservation expired) for the 7pm ferry.

Future Trip Edits

Set an alarm
insoles with more arch support
stock up on blister band-aids
open vents on tents at night