Giving Thanks For Turns –VIDEO

This submission contains a short article, photos and a POV video of a descent on Mt. Athatbasca that happened this weekend.


20 cms up high at Kicking Horse had my brain fully on winter at the beginning of the week. Combined with a perfect forecast after the storm of bright sun and cold temps, I knew that good turns could be made this Thanksgiving weekend. After the usual rallying of troops I found some dedicated partners who were willing to make the trek with me to one of my staple early season pow zones: Mt. Athabasca, in the Columbia Icefields. Props goes out to biglines member B., who traveled from Pincher Creek to Fernie via Mt. Athabasca ( a 12 hour detour).

As we hurtled towards Lake Louise (from Golden) the sky began to get lighter and I could see that the Rockies had less snow than the Purcells. This made me question whether I made the right call to go North. Usually in winter, I’m pretty on it in terms of tracking the storms and I was worried that I had mis-calculated the fact that this storm had come from the South. Sure enough, our projected goal of skiing the Silverhorn line on Athabasca was short lived. When we arrived at the peak, nothing but gray ice coated our line. We quickly made other plans. A sub peak to climbers right was passing the ‘white test’ and so we set our sights on it. I was stoked because I had never skied this peak and always wanted to. There was a great shot of it in Powder’s shooting gallery several years ago and there are a lot of aesthetic seracs around it.

For 6 hours we toiled our way up over rocks, then ice and then snow on the flanks of Athabasca. Summer was long gone and we shivered when we stopped for breaks in a –12 degree celcius sun-less deep freeze. We took a nice long break on top of the sub peak summit and then put our gear on and enjoyed some great turns back down.

Everyone was stoked, though pretty tired when we made it back down to the vehicle. 15 hours after I had left my house I returned with another great memory thanks to Athabasca. Now if I can only keep these kind of trips up this fall, I might actually be in shape when the lifts start spinning.