For more sick photos, visit Chump's Stash

Hoping to beef up our resumes so that we could apply for the ACMG ski guide program, Marty Schaffer and I hatched a plan to spend a week traversing from the Wapta Icefields to the Freshfield Icefield, where a group of friends would meet us for a week of skiing steep lines from a basecamp. Of course it didn’t go according plans.

The Wapta went well enough. We did part of the classic traverse (Peyto to Balfour) and bagged as many peaks and lines as we were rejected on. S Rhonda’s East Face and Mt Olive’s Northeast Face were great while bad weather forced us off Mt Balfour and Mt Collie. From Balfour it took us 2 days to traverse to Amiskwi Lodge where we lived in luxury for a couple days while skiing with friends and shredding some great freeskiing lines.

Eric Hjorleifson joined us there for the big slog down to the Blaeberry River and up the Mummery Glacier to the Freshfields. It was a massive day (about 25km with 6000 foot elevation gain through tough terrain with big camping packs on), but we got up it in one piece and pitched camp to wait for the group flying in.

I think we were still groggy the next morning when we caught Marty’s fall into a bergschrund at the bottom of Nanga Parbat’s East Face, but that woke us up in time for the climb! We got up the face just as a storm moved in and almost trap us on the summit. We were able to ski the face, but just barely, in terrible visibility and icy conditions. There was a lot of side-slipping, but we were just needed to get back to our tent safely.

Thanks to the satellite phone, we learned that no one would be flying in that day, or for the next three days likely. With only one more day’s worth of food, we had to get out. Luckily, Marty had tracked our route in on his GPS and we were able to whiteout-navigate all the way back down to the valley and out to Golden that afternoon.

Though a little disappointed to be back already, over beers and burger we decided the first week had gone pretty well. We had found a way to Amiskwi from the Wapta and had negotiated the Mummery Glacier safely. We had summited some peaks along the way and skied a handful of great lines. Everything else could be chalked up to character building! And we still had another week to get amongst it and make up for lost time as soon as the weather cleared.

For more sick photos, visit Chump's Stash