Trip Report: Elfin Lakes

Woman vs Wild

I was going a little stir-crazy in the city and decided that I needed to get out for an adventure. My criteria for an adventure was that I didn't want to be around bears, I didn't want to go somewhere new, and I didn't want to be in avalanche terrain. Elfin Lakes was the obvious choice.

After Saturday practice ended around at 1pm I sat on my sofa and thought about whether I really wanted to go camp solo in the rain. These thoughts persisted while I packed my bags, grabbed my skis and headed out to Squamish. I bumped up to the trailhead at 6pm armed with some candy I bought at the Save On in Squamish, then sat in the car eating licorice and drinking a diet coke, listening to the rain pattering on the windshield, thinking about how I could just drive away. But that wasn't really much of an adventure.

It was raining so hard my hood filled with water as I fumbled around in the trunk sorting out my bag. The Diamond Head parking lot was almost completely empty. I elected to hike up in my ski boots, ended up balancing my skis on my back so the bindings kind of clamped around my neck. Barely 1km in a truck bumped by with a snowmobile on the back and I stepped aside to let them go down, hoping I didn’t look like a complete lunatic who they’d need to turn around to rescue in an hour.

The road was more or less an open creek. About 50m below the waterfall there was patchy snow so I put on the skis and started the infinitely more satisfying process of skinning up the slushy mess of twigs and pinecones. The whole time I was thinking about just stopping at Red Heather.

I taped up my blisters at Red Heather, decided that was still an inadequate adventure, and then continued my lonely plod up to the ridge. Eventually the looming overhead hazards dissipated into the fog and I checked my GPS; my location floated along the contour lines and gently settled onto the trail markers, out of danger.

I was tired and my feet were beginning to blister but as the terrain leveled out along the ridge I found my body relaxing. I always think of the Mary Oliver poem. Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. The soft animal of my body, minus the angry animal of my feet, moved through the misty grey twilight to the hut.

There was a group of friends there celebrating a birthday, who invited me to hang out, which I happily accepted; one of the women even shared some of her red wine with me. I was fully aware that I either seemed like a hardcore mountaineer or a dangerously underprepared lunatic. All I had to eat was my licorice, two Lara bars, and $3.55 worth of bulk peanut m&ms. For some reason at the Save On I’d felt that was an adequate amount of provisions. Hoping to seem moderately competent, I didn’t share this fact with my new friends.

They told me that the truck I'd seen with the snowmobile was SAR, and three mountaineers had gone missing up towards Columnar and the Gargoyles, which I’d dimly thought about skiing the next morning. They hadn’t found them and the weather had prevented a helicopter from flying over. Their gear was still piled up against the wall. I felt incredibly sobered. I was proven to be a dangerously underprepared lunatic after all; though I’d been wary, poking my way across the ridgeline, I hadn’t genuinely thought about turning around at any point.

The group tried to convince me to sleep inside but I was determined to try out my new one person tent. In the end even my -9 bag wasn’t quite comfortable, although I don't think it got below freezing. I dimly thought about dragging my sleeping mat and bag into the hut to sleep on the floor, but I wasn’t quite uncomfortable enough to brave going outside, just uncomfortable enough to keep tossing and turning and hovering somewhere near being asleep. At 6:30 in the morning I woke up and realized that I’d finally gotten some sleep and that I also had to get up and going immediately so I didn’t miss my check-in time. I packed up my wet tent, my wet sleeping bag, my wet clothes and got moving. I’d brought some instant coffee sticks in anticipation of having a leisurely backcountry coffee — maybe even watching a beautiful sunrise — but I eschewed that in favour of putting on my cold wet clothes and my ski boots, which lit up every blister I’d created yesterday and woke me up with a vengeance. Before it hit 7am I was up and skiing away into the clouds.

Although I was tired and footsore, the movement got me back into the soft animal headspace, and I wasn’t tired or hungry at all. It was still raining.

I’d been checking my GPS frequently as I puttered along the ridgeline but when I transitioned for some reason I was confident in my location, despite the cloud cover, and cheerfully dropped in at least 200m to the north of where I should have been over towards red heather. I definitely managed to avoid the cliff bands to skier’s left, by a good 500m or so, but I ended up stranded between patches of trees and dry dirt after 20 seconds of fun slush skiing.

I ended up taking off my skis and hauling myself and my gear through patches of alder, dirt, and variable slushy snow that every now and then I broke through up to my hips. I was too grimly determined to waste time being grumpy even as the bindings of my skis yanked apart my matted bun and twigs and moss and dirt plastered themselves to my soaked clothes. About 20m from rejoining the trail I hit a steep creek bed with rotted snow bridges and slippery logs.

I was well aware that out of all the dumb things I’d been doing, falling into a creek would likely be the most dangerous, and if I didn’t get hypothermia I’d have an extremely unpleasant walk down the road to my car. Luckily I was able to scramble upstream along the banks after contemplating the slippery logs and found a snow bridge that didn’t look entirely corroded. I took a daring step across and then flung myself into the snow bank on the opposite side. Then I was lucky I was alone; if I had brought anyone into this mess I would have been wracked with guilt, and if someone else had done this me I would have been outraged. By myself I didn’t need to bother with anything other than getting moving again.

I found the trail, almost unrecognizable from the height of winter with the pink algae blooms over the runnels and pinecone dirt, and had three minutes of slushy turns before I had to start taking off my skis to skip over dirt sections. Then I hit the final stretch of snow and had to deload for good. My toes and blisters were killing me enough that I walked about half of the two kilometers down backwards, and then took off my snow boots and put on my soaked hut booties and thus liberated, flapped my way down with speed. Overall the return trip took about two and a half hours. I peeled off my soaked layers at the car and turned on the glorious heat and seat warmer and then headed towards sanctuary: Cloudbust Coffee.

I was very pleased with my adventure but I was thinking about the three missing mountaineers: what equipment did they have? Where were they? Was there any chance they might be alive? Who would deal with their things still stacked neatly against the wall of the hut? Which of their cars was still sitting in the parking lot? My adventure was a tame one: a 22km round trip along a ridgeline in the sub-alpine forest, with a hut for a quick escape, a trip I’d done before, but I still felt a bit lucky, and very sobered.