Low Snow
A trip to the Blanket Glacier Chalet, a winter that broke its promise, and the reset we didn't know we needed.
To new readers on Substack — hi, it’s me, Chris Pew. Co-founder and owner of TREW Gear. We’re based in Portland, Oregon and design boutique technical outerwear for skiers and snowboarders. Every month I write a column called Contemplations for our community of skiers and riders. I’ve decided to give this column its own Substack publication, renamed “Peak Enjoyment,” for no other reason than to give myself more room for thoughts. It seems like a better platform to expand on subjects at the periphery of my core concerns: the state of skiing, backcountry culture, and designing apparel. I’ve also been following writers on Substack for several months now, and I’ve decided this is a media platform I can get behind. So here I am. Here’s the first of what will likely be a monthly occurrence. Hope you enjoy it.
To celebrate my 40th year in my current incarnation, some friends and I booked the Blanket Glacier this past January. The Blanket, as we refer to it familiarly, is a family-owned hut in the Monashees of British Columbia. Marty Schaffer took over the operation from his parents and turned it into the type of if-you-know-you-know destination that dedicated backcountry skiers and snowboarders dream about. We have frequented the Blanket in April, as a kind of end-of-year trip where we gather marketing assets, discuss new designs, and reflect on the winter. But I had actually never been to the Blanket in the middle of winter. I had never skied its infamous pillows or choked on cold Monashee powder, as I desperately wanted to do.
It was a miserably slow start to winter here on the West coast, but we watched the storms hammer British Columbia with ten feet of cold snow in the few weeks leading up to our trip. The conditions looked so good that I forced myself to stop reading the forecasts. Things were lining up in the rare way that felt too good to be true and I didn’t want to jinx it. Unfortunately, jinx incoming.
We rolled into Revelstoke just as the mercury rose well above freezing and the several feet of cold snow that had blanketed the mountains just the day before we showed up turned into wet glop. You never know what you might be able to find in the high alpine, so we nervously maintained some sliver of hope that in the north-facing shadows of the high-alpine peaks, there lay the cold dry powder.
After all, we were in excellent hands. You couldn’t ask for better guides than Troy and Heather. Troy the intrepid guide’s-guide. He’s seen it all, done it all, and will tell you all about it with the profanity of a drunken pirate and a teenager’s dirty jokes. Heather is the yin to Troy’s yang. She matches his off-beat humor with the quiet confidence and strength of someone who packs out her own elk and has more days at the Blanket this season than Marty, lead-guide and owner. If there was powder in those hills, Troy and Heather would find it. Spoiler alert: there was no powder in those hills.
The first day was probably our softest snow. The wet glop was skiable, well, call it shlarpable. We surf-schlarped the pillows and trees close to the hut. Logging maybe four or five laps in one afternoon. It ended up being a darn fun, albeit soaking wet, day.
We woke up the second day to continued warm temperatures and a dangerously upside down snowpack. Wet glop weighs a lot and you can imagine how that might make things unstable. An inverted mess, like warm cake on top of frosting.
“You know what that means,” Troy bellowed at our morning briefing as we stared at him, holding out hope that maybe he was going to tell us about the good snow at higher elevations. “Avalanche Ranch!” he finished. Our hopes thrashed.
Sure enough, as we tiptoed up the skin track to take a peek at what kind of safe pockets of skiing we might be able to find, we discovered a crown that wrapped around the lower elevation slopes of the lake and felt plenty of unsettling settling in the snowpack. Basically, we saw enough and headed back to the hut to find other ways to recreate. We spent the entire day building a banked slalom, which, when recreational substances are fueling your architectural ambitions, was built way too gnarly. Multiple double-overhead vertical walls of melt-freeze snow that nobody except Joe Toney, the guy that has a pump track in his backyard, could fully descend. But that didn’t stop us from trying for the better part of five hours. Hungover and sore by four in the afternoon, we retreated to the sauna to recover.
The next day brought colder temperatures and the glop turned to death-cookie riddled refreeze. At least the snowpack was safe again and we had summit fever. Knowing full well that we were marching towards a descent that would be confidently in the hazardous category, we climbed one of the mellower hills to the north of the hut. It offered some beautiful views of surrounding peaks. The descent was comical. For us PNWers, it wasn’t so different from an average late Spring day on the upper slopes of Mt Hood, when the death-cookies are in full bloom. For the gents from Utah, it was like skiing on an inhospitable alien planet.
We made the most of it and probably skied five or six big laps. There was some schlarping to be had on lower elevations, but overall, some of the most dangerous and terrifying ski conditions I’ve encountered in a while. No one got injured and good snacks and good company made for a pretty good day in the mountains.
Our final full day in the hut was forecasted for severe clear, as the Capow guides like to say. The plan was to explore the exposed glaciers at the base of Blanket peak. But Troy, the intrepid Captain of our wayward band of snow pirates, was summit-hungry.
After exploring a new glacier about a quarter of the way up the peak, we started aiming for the summit. We gathered about 500 ft below the summit, where booting was the only option and thin coverage ruled out skiing from the summit.
In my experience, on a hut trip like this, you don’t climb something that you’re not going to ski. That’s not why you’re there. You’re there to ski. But not on this trip. We were chasing something else at that moment: climb it for the hell of it. Savor every uncomfortable bit. Peak Enjoyment.
“Summit or die motherfuckers!” Troy yelled over the howling winds as he set the boot pack to the summit. It hit us like Iron Maiden bellowing from a stereo system. We would have followed Troy anywhere at that moment and I quickly lined up to march to the summit of Blanket.
The triumphant high-fives, half-hugs, and rebel yells at the peak would have an observer convinced that we were about to ski the run of our lives. Instead, buzzing with adrenaline, we downclimbed like a bunch of summer tourists on Mt Hood and prepared for the descent.
We finally broke our streak of ridiculously ugly snow conditions and the high-alpine, north-facing slopes of Blanket protected some decent, powder-adjacent snow conditions. Yes, it was a little grabby and weird, but it was soft and it was shreddable and that’s all we cared about. The snowboarders won the day as they arced fast turns through the grabby semi-powder. Us skiers, with our multiple edges for the grabby snow to impact, had a more difficult time, but we were able to ski it with speed and to feel the weightlessness and freedom that we all love.
We flew out the next day. Once we got back in touch with our loved ones to let them know we were safe, everyone had to answer the same question, “how was it?” And we probably all answered it the same way, “It was fucking awful. We had an amazing time!”
We didn’t know it at the time, but this trip was a tiny microcosm of our whole winter on the West coast. Every week you would look at the new weekly weather forecast to find your expectations and hopes for the season crushed, again. It was the season that never really started. It felt like winter didn’t hold up its end of the deal.
But that’s just it, I guess. If I was reminded of anything from our awful trip to the Blanket, it’s that the mountains don’t owe us anything. Maybe you, like me, were spoiled with predictable powder in the first half of your life. Or maybe you, also like me, just weren’t paying close enough attention. Like addicts, every good powder turn was collected and cataloged in the brain’s repository of experiences that we would like to repeat, while the other days blended together in the haze of memories that are harder to recall. That is, until you experience a winter or a trip so bad that it resets the scale. This winter was like a Dry January for a heavy drinker. We’re paying attention now and the Spring corn will taste like winter’s champagne.