I can’t remember who first told me about the Spearhead Traverse, but I was immediately excited about it. Being more drawn to adventure and beautiful views than skiing per se, I thought it would be a trip worth traveling for. The traverse lies just beyond the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort, connecting the two mountains over 20 miles through fantastic alpine terrain spanning 11 glaciers. It is unlike anything we have in the lower 48, both for the terrain itself and the easy access to the alpine through the ski resort. Kinda like Washington, but without the bushwhacking through the forest for 5000 ft.

I learned to ski in the Pacific Northwest, being “just what you do” during the dreary winter months. But I fell in love with it as an alternative to winter hiking or snowshoeing, particularly the ability to cover so much terrain so (relatively) quickly. Since moving to California my ski trips have been much fewer, for lack of either partners or motivation to traipse around in the snow when warm trails and crags beckon much closer to home. I booked some refundable flights last year with the idea that one of the first two weekends of April might work out for the traverse. In reality I thought there was about a 10% chance of getting a weather window at this time of year, so I tried to keep my expectations low. Some friends and I had planned to ski Glaicer Peak the previous Memorial Day, fully a month later into stable summer weather, only to be completely shut down by storms.

Planning three days for the traverse would allow us to enjoy a relaxed pace and fully appreciate the backcountry. Not to mention I was completely out of skiing shape and didn’t want to be stressed about staying on a tight schedule. I imagined a leisurely outing, being whisked up the side of a mountain of a ski lift, following well trodden tracks through rolling terrain, and enjoying beautiful views from the comfort of camp. This vision wasn’t completely wrong, but I wouldn’t call what we did leisurely.

A last minute work trip meant that the first weekend of April was out. I jealously marveled as the weather forecast for that weekend turned to 2 days of perfect weather (it later deteriorated). Miraculously, another ridge of high pressure looked to be approaching for the second weekend. Saturday showed some instability but Sunday and Monday looked clear and seasonably warm. The trip was on! I almost couldn’t believe my luck.

The weather forecast deteriorated somewhat in the days before our trip. Colie convinced me to do the traverse in two days instead of three, which in retrospect was definitely the right call. In general I agree with the sentiment that if you are going to spend two days out, you might as well do three. You won’t have to carry that much more stuff for an extra day. But in the case of winter camping, one night is the perfect number as far as I’m concerned. Everything gets cold and wet, and you have to carry out your poo.

We got a little worried when more clouds and even snow was forecast for Monday, but at least it would be warm. We watched a video of the traverse showing some clearly excellent skiers doing jump turns down a chute. Huh. I hoped it was something we could skip, or that the snow coverage would be better this late in the season. Neither of us had been to the Whistler backcountry before, and we wondered if we were getting in over our heads. My dream of an easygoing jaunt was starting to seem less realistic, and we were both a little nervous. But that’s what makes it an adventure!

The first crux of the trip was packing. I planned to bring the 40 liter pack that I always use for skiing and climbing, which does not have any external pockets. As an added challenge I wanted to keep the sides of the pack free for ski carries. It was quite a squeeze with the glacier rescue gear, rope, winter camping setup, avalanche safety gear, boot crampons, ski crampons, ice axe and climbing skins. The amount of time I spent packing and re-packing for this trip was almost comical. I showed Colie one of the best tricks for packing efficiency, which is that the sleeping bag should never take up any space. You just pack most of your other stuff then cram the sleeping bag into the spaces in between. An extra challenge was making sure that I could still access avalanche safety gear easily. We both practiced packing our backpacks the night before just to make sure everything fit, even though we would have to unpack them again for sleeping in the car that night.

With the ridiculous cost of lodging in Whistler and not wanting to get up any earlier than absolutely necessary, we decided to sleep in Colie’s Subaru in the overnight parking lot. Sleeping in the lot was clearly not allowed, but we saw lots of vans, RVs, and other forms of sleeping vehicles that make us think that no one really cared. However, as we ventured back to the lot after dinner, one van after another started up its engine and left. Huh. After that we decided to be as inconspicuous as possible, i.e. not turn on lights or slam doors, but we still had a car full of randomly strewn about gear, torn grocery bags with food falling out of them, skis, boots, ice axes, car bags, camp bags, water bottles, and a box full of leftover pizza. It was hilariously difficult to do any form of getting ready for bed or preparing our gear for the next day, and eventually I gave up on finding things like my headlamp, glasses, and phone charger and just went to sleep. The next morning we paid for our disobedience to the posted signs with a marathon of packing and organizing in the freezing parking lot. We both wished we would have just shelled out the cash for lodging in Squamish and finished the drive in the morning.

I expected the second crux of the trip to be riding a ski lift with an overnight pack. I imagined myself turtling off the lift, my arms flailing like an overturned bug while groups of children pointed and laughed. Actually it was not that hard, but social anxiety overrepresented it in my mind compared to actual dangers like falling into a crevasse. I was scared of that too though, just to be clear.

At the top of the gondola, we saw that the 7th Heaven lift had opened early, so we opted for that instead of the Glacier Express. Initially we had planned on taking the T-bar to the Blackcomb Glacier, which would require skiing down first, but we could see that it was not running yet. We decided to just follow everyone else up the ridge. I had seen pictures of the Whistler backcountry gate looking like the Hillary Step, but I was still a little surprised at the number of people we set off with. Different parties dropped down to the glacier at different points, but I don’t think it made too much of a difference in the end. As we tackled the first uphill skin, I got really hot and was stressed out by all of the other parties. Most of the skiers looked to be doing day trips; it seemed like we were the only ones with overnight packs. After the parties mostly sorted by speed and I stripped down to my base layer, I started to feel much more relaxed and enjoy the scenery. Ah finally, the wilderness! The views were gorgeous from the very beginning, and they only got better.

I felt pretty sketchy on the first few descents with the heavy pack, but I soon got used to it and was able to make actual turns. The first ski that made me nervous was dropping down onto the Trorey Glacier. A few parties had bunched up here, and we couldn’t see the slope past a rollover. I wanted to continue along the ridge because it looked like we might find a less steep spot, but Colie looked at the map and confirmed that it would only be steeper over there. I let another skier pass and started down, grateful that no one else was behind me. Fortunately it was not too steep or narrow, so I just took it slow and made it down without incident.

Transitions were also slow to start out with, but with so many of them, I soon got into a groove and became more efficient. The traversing nature of the descents made my quads burn, so the uphills almost felt like a break. I was feeling the altitude though, and I struggled to keep up with Colie. The first point where the main skin track split was around Mount Pattison. The left side provided some steep skiing for those inclined, but we opted for the lower angle route around the south side of Mount Pattison (near the location of one of the proposed huts). We saw a lot fewer people beyond this point. Everyone doing the traverse in a day was far ahead of us, and the day trippers were heading back. Our goal for the day was to reach the Diavolo Glacier, a little more than halfway through the traverse. To my relief, we were still on track to do that at what I felt was my maximum sustainable pace.

Things got a lot more interesting for the middle section of the traverse starting around the Platform Glacier. Every glacier was its own little world of sculpted snow and hidden passages. Spectacular views opened up that made me shout in disbelief. One of the things I love about traverses is how at each pass or col, it’s a surprise what’s on the other side up until the very last seconds of ascent. I also love looking back at the terrain I have passed over, sometimes unrecognizable even though I was just there. It’s a peculiar thing about snow covered terrain that it often looks much more impressive from a distance than when on it.

We caught up with another party at the Tremor Col. They seemed surprised that we had made the trip all the way from Seattle just to do the traverse, which I found funny not only because I had actually traveled much further than that, but because I was giddy with joy at being in this spectacular place. I guess it’s just everyday stuff for some people!

Apparently they were much better at going uphill in downhill mode than I (as is everyone from what I can tell) because after the Ripsaw Glacier they were very far ahead of us. We had to do some shenanigans to get onto the Naden Glacier from the Ripsaw Glacier, which consisted of a heinous amount of sidestepping uphill (I eventually just took my skis off and booted), followed by the scariest descent of the whole traverse. It was steep, heavily gouged, and peppered with rocks. I was so relieved to be off of that one!

After another couple of transitions, we found ourselves at the Iago ridgeline bootpack. I had somehow imagined this to be a narrow knife edge traverse, but it was actually quite wide. We did a kind of silly little ski down to an awkward transition point on the side of a steep slope. Upon further examination the slope was melting out and completely hollow underneath where I was standing, so we made it a quick one. I would not have wanted to skin down the exposed slope that we had skied down. Perhaps the safest solution here would have been to ski all the way down to the Iago Glacier, especially given that the hollow slope also had a cornice looming overhead, but that would have required a lot more elevation gain.

We could see some skiers far, far away on a slope high above us, and Colie seemed to think this was terrain we would pass through before arriving at the Diavolo Glacier. This was a little disheartening to me since I was getting quite tired on the ascent that never seemed to end. I couldn’t imagine how long it would take us to get all the way over there. But suddenly, we were at the ridge! Our ascent for the day was done. The party in front of us was setting up camp at an established site there.

We agreed that we wanted to ski the steep slopes down to the Diavolo Glacier that day, while they were still soft. It was nice to get so many turns in, but the snow quality was mostly poor. The shadier parts of the slope were already quite icy. We passed a party traveling in the opposite direction, one of whom told us that we should ski the Overlord Glacier instead of doing the rappel, one of the few major route decisions we would have to make. He said there was excellent snow to be found there. So far it had seemed like the nicest snow was on the uphill for us, so I could see why people would do the traverse in the opposite direction.

The Diavolo Glacier is huge (by PNW standards) and flat, so we just skied out on it until we felt that we were far enough from the runout zone of the cliffs above and set up our camp. And what a camp it was! We were surrounded by peaks on one side and had views straight into the McBride Range on the other. We probed a perimeter of safety just to make sure we weren’t setting up camp on top of a snow bridge. I hit ice in many spots, but where I didn’t, the snow was deeper than the entire length of my probe. We had a glorious hour or so before the sun went behind a ridge. While we were sad to lose it, our location meant that the sun should hit us directly upon rising the next morning, assuming it was not too cloudy. We were not looking forward to packing up our wet camp in the cold given how challenging it had been the previous morning back in civilization. We melted snow for the next day then enjoyed the sunset from the comfort of our sleeping bags.

We awoke the next morning just before dawn. The sun bathed the glacier around us in warm light for a few precious minutes before passing behind a thin cloud layer, where it would remain for most of the day. The moody light and silence created an atmosphere of calm mystery. Packing up camp was not nearly as bad as we feared, and we started up the so-called “heartbreak hill,” our last big ascent of the traverse. It seemed I had acclimatized somewhat over the night, or at least gotten a good rest, as I cruised up the slope easily. We had an option to go to the left, higher on Mount Benvolio, or to the right, under the North face. We opted for the right option, but upon rounding the corner we saw that we were traversing under an enormous cornice. Not recommended.

Our last big navigation decision was choosing a route across the Overlord Glacier. We would either do a short ascent, a short rappel, then traverse the glacier, or ski all the way down to the bottom of the glacier then ascend back up. Everyone we talked to had advised us to do the ski, but our guidebook characterized it as an atypical variation that would expose us to unnecessary crevasse risk. I inched my way closer to the ridge, trying to get a look at the route either up or down, but I couldn’t see anything other than a few ski tracks going off a rollover and a skin track going up. A lot of factors went into the decision, but I’m not going to lie, I think we ultimately decided to ski down because we were already in downhill mode and didn’t want to transition again. But what a ski it was! The folks we had passed the previous day were right, the snow quality here was incredible! The Overlord Glacier was very well covered, so crevasses were not a problem.

We were shortly within sight of the Kees and Claire Hut and passed a couple of parties out for day trips. After the hut, the snow quality deteriorated substantially and became very grabby, so much so that I stopped even trying to make turns. The final ski out over the Musical Bumps was a long slog, and it was getting warm and sunny. I was really looking forward to getting back into the resort, where I expected easy groomed slopes. But no! It was so warm that even the groomed slopes had turned into a nightmare of deep, quad-burning slush. I even wiped out on a blue run and turtled with my big backpack! I was really embarrassed, but it felt good to get the cold snow into my clothes. When we finally made it out, it felt like summer in Whistler Village. What a contrast to our departure in the freezing morning the day before.

Every adventure has its challenges. As long as they don’t become too numerous, the trip stays type I fun. With heavy packs and some altitude, but no bushwhacking or real route finding, this trip was a great balance of challenge and fun. The views were absolutely incredible, we got to enjoy some solitude without being too far from civilization, and we even got some excellent turns in fresh snow. I am so grateful to Colie for committing to the trip and making it happen!