My first big trip of the year was a doubleheader of Yamnuska courses out in Alberta – firstly an Avalanche Skills Training course (AST1) followed by an Intro to Backcountry Ski course, in mid March. Ski touring and ski mountaineering has been on my radar for quite some time, and given I’d like to climb Mount Columbia (typically done on skis) next year, now was a good time to start picking it up. I was lucky to be able to get the AST1 booked on a date immediately before the ski course (which I had booked earlier), and was able to get all my bookings (flight, rental car, hotel, and ski gear) all sorted out a month out, which is challenging to do in the summer.
My plan was to fly in early enough to get settled in Canmore, flex the day between the two courses (any of a bonus course day, ski day, short hike, checking out gear shops, or doing some work), and fly out the day after the ski course ended. Unfortunately I was unable to get a midday return flight and had to settle with an early 7:30am flight instead, which would make for a groggy morning. I was planning to get a day or two skiing in Ontario before the courses, but winter has been pretty much non-existent this year (thank you El Nino + climate change), so I couldn’t make it happen unfortunately. So these courses would be my first time skiing in five years.
Day 1
My flight to Calgary was with Porter and took off at 11am, so I was up fairly early to catch the UP Express to the airport. I wasn’t packed super heavy for this trip as I would be renting a lot of the gear, but still decided to check in a bag since I wanted to bring my 50L mountaineering pack for the courses, and it’s a bit big for a carry-on. I left my apartment right on schedule at 7:15am and took a Bike Share up to the closest subway station. I literally mean up, as it is an uphill bike ride, on a clunker of a bike! The subway arrived immediately and I was headed west to the UP Express station, where it was a ten minute wait for that train. Not a huge deal since I budgeted some extra time in case of delays. After paying to check my bag at the desk (for some reason Porter wouldn’t allow me to do it online) it was smooth sailing through security and was at my gate at 8:30am. Not bad for not using a car and with three modes of transportation!
At the gate I got some work done (didn’t book the day off) and had a couple of meetings. The wait in line for coffee was longer than that for security which I found highly amusing. There really should be a separate line at Tim Hortons for people who just want coffee and not food, but I digress… An hour from my departure I realized I was at the wrong gate – there was a WestJet flight to Calgary leaving at the exact same time! The flight was smooth sailing, got a few reports done for work while battling the mediocre Porter wifi (to be fair, free wifi at all is still better than nothing), and ate a ton of food from home. I also started listening to a new audiobook on Audible – Dark Summit by Nick Heil. This one was about the Everest controversy in 2006.
After waiting a bit to collect my bags, it was off to the Alamo at the Calgary airport to pick up my rental car. I ended up with an absolutely colossal Infinity QX80 Luxury SUV. This thing was larger than the truck I drove in Saskatchewan in 2023, and its curb weight is nearly three times that of my Chevy Spark (6085 lbs vs 2278 lbs). Suffice to say it was incredibly awkward and nerve-wracking for the first few minutes! Luckily Canmore is not a crowded city like Toronto so getting around wouldn’t be too bad.
After a very scenic 75 minute drive to one of my favourite places on earth, Canmore (the mountains in the winter are even more gorgeous than in the summer!), I checked in at my lodging for the week, the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge. At under $100 a night, very solid price for Canmore. After eating the rest of my wraps I had prepared in the morning, I went out for a walk to check out Valhalla Pure Outfitters (needed an extra pair of ski socks) and also grabbed some groceries, which the cashier gave me a $10 discount for some reason? After a long walk back carrying the groceries (mostly easy stuff for the outdoor days as well as oatmeal for the morning), I relaxed in my room for the rest of the evening, getting a bit more work done.
Day 2
My first full day in Canmore would be a classroom day for the AST1 course. The course started at 9:30am, I was actually able to work a half day in the morning as I went to bed still on Eastern Time, and as a result I woke up at 5am MT (7am ET). That worked out pretty well, since I did not book off the Friday (originally planned to work remote in Canmore between the courses), but decided to add an extra day for my AST1 a few days before I left. So, my plan was to work the equivalent of a full day (7 hours) across Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Luckily I have a ton of reports to write, so chipping away at that 7 hours across multiple days would work pretty well.
After getting three reports nearly completed in the four hours I had to work in the morning (5am to 9am), I took a quick shower then drove over to the Yamnuska office for the course. The instructor/guide was Barry Blanchard, a renowned Canadian alpine climber who is definitely an interesting character. For lunch I spent some time with a couple from the Adirondacks, Mark and Michelle. Michelle is actually Canadian and was born on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, which was pretty cool. Super nice people! The course itself was pretty interesting but I was quickly reminded of my sleep-deprived university days and nodded off quite a few times. Maybe the early morning work session was a bad idea?
After the course was done for the day I drove over to the Banff National Park entrance to pick up passes for the next few days. Luckily for me, my dad is a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, and there’s a new incentive for serving members/veterans and their immediate families to get free daily access to Parks Canada locations if they present a CF-1 card. So I was able to get access for free, though the lady at the booth seemed to think that my dad had to be there with me (she honoured it anyway). I guess they’re still getting the feel for the program?
After grabbing my passes, I drove over to Gear Up to pick up my backcountry ski gear – skis, boots, skins, poles and helmet. Rosie, the girl who was helping me out gave me a quick rundown on how the backcountry bindings and skins worked – was pretty straightforward but I was sure I would forget most of it by the following day.
In the evening I went for a 6km run through Canmore and enjoyed the views of all the peaks surrounding the town. Much better scenery than the Don Trail! It was about 4C so perfect temperatures for running. After getting back to my room I organized my stuff for the next day which would be the AST field day.
Day 3
I was up at 6:00am and got my stuff together as well as preparing a bit of food for the day. At 7:15am I was on the road to Bow Summit in Banff National Park. Although it was dark for the first part of the drive, when the sun came out it was quite scenic. After about 80 mins of driving, I arrived at the Bow Summit parking lot – on the way I passed by Bow Lake which was nice to see after my Intro to Mountaineering course. After arriving, I got my gear all set up – it took a bit of time to get the feel of it but wasn’t too difficult. Of the nine of us (including Barry), five of us were on skis, three on snowshoes and one on a splitboard. It was really cool seeing a splitboard up close!
We skinned over to a flatter area and spent the morning there, learning about avalanche transceivers and how to use them (both in tracking and searching modes), using probes and shovels, and techniques for group searching and using the team shovel conveyor technique. Barry did a great job setting up some scenarios, including a situation where two victims (tupperware lid + transceiver) were buried in different places in a simulated avalanche.
Although this was far less stressful than a real avalanche situation, it was good practice determining the rough area of the “victim” with the transceiver (which indicates the direction and proximity to a transmitting transceiver), probing in a spiral pattern to find the victim, then digging out the victim with shovels. In terms of skiing, we were on our skins all morning and it was good practicing travel in walk mode, as well as stepping in/out of the technical bindings, which were a bit more finicky than standard downhill bindings.
In the afternoon we skinned up the trail a bit and discussed various features on nearby peaks including slab features and wind cross-loading. We then moved up to a wooded area with a fairly steep slope, where we carved out a cross-section of the snow to check out the layers as well as test the strength of the snow using shovel compression tests. It was really interesting observing the separation of the top layer (slab) from the bottom and thinking about the parallels with materials failures. It kind of reminded me of grain boundary sliding! We even carved out a large section for a sliding block or Rutschblock Test, which involves someone (in this case, Barry) using their weight to cause the block to separate. It really gave a great visualization of how avalanches initiate! Two videos of Barry loading the rutschblock here and here.
After that, we skinned a bit further up the trail and it got quite steep, and I fell a couple times as I tended to want to lean forward and stay on my toes – turns out it’s better to lean back to capitalize on the grip of the skins. Probably would have helped to use the heel lifts! After some more time observing the snow conditions and potential avalanche features on the surrounding slopes, we switched over to downhill mode. My skins had started to become detached at the front and there was quite a bit of snow that got on the adhesive. Once I was able to step into the downhill version of the binding, it started to feel a bit more comfortable. We then skied down to the car, which involved some tight terrain through the trees (I really took it slow here and side slipped a good chunk of it – really out of practice!) followed by some more wider trail which I was glad for, though the grade was pretty shallow, so I couldn’t really do any turns without slowing down too much.
After getting back to the cars, Barry presented us with our AST1 certificates. I feel like I really did not know too much still even after the field day, so was glad to get out and go do the extra AST practice day on Friday. We said goodbye (only three of us were doing the plus day) and it was a smooth drive back to Canmore.
After hanging up my stuff in my room at the ski lodge, I relaxed for a bit then walked about half a mile to the McDonalds for a highly unhealthy dinner. I was off to bed at 10pm or so – another fairly early morning the next day!
Day 4
The AST1 Plus day was just a four person affair, with Barry guiding myself, Mark and Michelle. This was a pretty fun day that didn’t do too much avalanche specific stuff, but we got quite a lot of reps on the touring skis which was awesome, since I wanted as much practice as I could get.
We met at Bow Summit again around 8:40am and after getting our skins on our skis, we were off on the trail. Quite a few ascents on skins followed by descents through some sweet powder (I really struggled on some of the descents as I am not a powder skier at all!) which was a ton of fun. The day started off cool but it warmed up to close to 10 degrees C towards the end of the day, so the snow got really soft and was a bit trickier to operate in.
The highlight of the day was ascending right into the alpine zone (on a very gentle slope which was pretty safe avalanche wise – avalanche risk was very high due to the increasing temperatures!) and getting some sweet views of some of the surrounding peaks. The descent after this climb was super fun as well, got a bunch of big turns in which was more my forte (as opposed to the tight turns in trees!)
The final part of our tour was skinning down through the trees back to the car. It was a gentle slope down the ravine but the snow was tricky to work with and my skis didn’t glide all that well with skins compared to Mark, Michelle and Barry’s, so I took a long time! Overall, a pretty sweet day skiing in the Rockies.
After driving home and resting a bit, I grabbed some dinner quickly then it was back to the Yamnuska office for an evening start to the intro to backcountry ski course! It was initially supposed to be a group of seven, but only five of us showed up. We spent about an hour and a half with our guide, Niki, who talked a bit about avalanche safety and trip planning (a bit of a recap for me) as well as some gear review. It was good to meet everyone!
Note for my GPS watch, “ascents” were time spent with skins on and “descents” were time spent with skins off. Would be nice if there was a “transition” but oh well. So the transitions are kinda mixed in.
Day 5
A bit of a change of gears for the backcountry ski course – we planned to meet at the Yamnuska office at 7:30am and drive up to Bow Summit from there. I was going to be very familiar with that area having been there the previous two days! We ended up leaving a bit later because we waited a while for one participant, Ambrose, who just never showed up at all. Interestingly, he was late for the evening meetup the previous day as well. Very odd. For the drive, I carpooled with Kim, who was originally from the Toronto area but has since moved to Ottawa. She’s also in the Canadian Navy reserves so quite a bit in common with me (I lived in Ottawa in elementary school and my dad was in the navy). It was great having some company for the drive up. We arrived just after 9am and the others showed up shortly after – Niki as well as Imi and Pete, an English couple, both doctors, who were taking an extended layover on their trip back to the UK after two years living in New Zealand! I later joked with them that I too was a doctor, though nowhere near the same kind (PhD).
After getting our stuff together we headed to the open field area where the AST-1 group had done avalanche practice, and we did a quick overview of avalanche safety, use of the avalanche gear, as well as running through a quick scenario. At around noon, we headed out on the trail for a quick tour, which lasted just over 3.5 hours and involved a couple climbs and descents.
Despite the freeze overnight and the warm temperatures during the day, the snow was in pretty good shape and we had some great skiing conditions! It was also good to start really getting the hang of the touring skis/bindings, and I really enjoyed the skinning (you can really get into a good rhythm, unlike in snowshoes or in boots). For the second climbing section, I led the group up with Niki providing some coaching.
It again was a really great sunny day, and even though I ditched my lower body base layer, I was still pretty warm all day. This time I brought my helmet and used it for the downhill sections. Overall, a great day with a bunch of great folks! The last section was my least favourite again, as it involved doing the last bit of descent back to the car in walk mode (with skins) on some gentle downhill terrain that was pretty packed down, and had a lot of switchbacks. A few bumps and bruises along the way for a few of us, but overall not the worst. We made it back to the car park just after 4pm and discussed the plan for the next day.
After heading back to Canmore, I went out for dinner and a drink with Imi and Pete to Grizzly Paw, and it was great chatting with them and getting to know them. Super nice folks! I can’t overstate how the highlights of all my trips with Yam have been the people! It was also great not eating dinner alone for once. After dinner we parted ways and I headed back to the ski lodge, and rested up for the fourth day of skiing!
Day 6
Our second day of skiing with Niki had us driving to the Crowfoot Glades, which had the approach just before Bow Lake. Unfortunately Kim realized 5 minutes away that she had forgotten her skins in the gear room at the Yam office, so she wasn’t able to join the rest of us for the day. We decided that she would drive my rental car back to Canmore and leave the keys at the Yam office, and I would carpool with Pete and Imi for trip back after skiing.
This was definitely the best ski day thus far on the trip. We parked at the pull out for the viewing point and after a brief descent towards Bow Lake, it was a 2km approach across the southeast part of the lake towards the glades. Really scenic and it was great to get some solid kms in on some flatter terrain. We eventually reached the start of the up section and man this was definitely the most challenging uphill I had done thus far. Pretty steep, and because there was a decent crust due to the refreeze the prior night, the ski trail was pretty slick and it was tricky in places. I tried to stay in the softer snow as best I could, and really took the uphill turns carefully.
Eventually we broke out of the forest into some more open terrain and the views as always were incredible. It started to get warm pretty quick and even though I was pretty light on layers I was still baking in my ski pants. Eventually we reached the top of a bump (our high point for the day) and had a pretty decent couple of pitches down, though I took a fall almost immediately. Getting up in powder is pretty hard with a backpack on but I found out that taking off the backpack and using it to push yourself up works pretty well. Niki took some photos of us skiing down a couple pitches as well.
After descending to just below the treeline, we put our skins back on and did a quick ascent to do another run to finish the day off. It was getting pretty warm and the snow was getting sticky, so it was a bit tricky in places. We were skiing on a north-facing area which meant the sun exposure was lower, so the snow was still in decent shape given the temperatures. This run was pretty crazy, lots of tight turns and “survival skiing” through the glades, super fun though! We eventually made it down to the lake and after putting the skins back on, it was a great steady pace back to the pull out.
Just before packing up and heading out, Niki demonstrated a compression test and an extended compression test, the latter of which is useful to see if a slab fracture will propagate – this is pretty key to an avalanche occurring. She also pulled out her magnifying glass and we took a peek at some of the differences in snow/ice crystal morphology between the fresh snowfall, depth hoar and deep persistent slab. Very cool seeing more materials science in snow!
After packing up, we headed back to Canmore and said goodbye to Pete and Imi. Really enjoyed getting to know them, awesome people! I ended up forgetting my transceiver in their car so I did drive over to their AirBNB before dinner to pick it up. For dinner I went to Rocky Mountain Flatbread Co. and had a pretty solid artisan pizza (West Coast) with toppings almost identical (smoked salmon and capers) to the “Classique” bagel at St. Viateur in Montreal. Solid meal to wind out a solid day of skiing!
Day 7
My last day of skiing would be another plus day. For this one, however, since I was the only one from the course to sign up for the plus day, and Yam requires at least 3 people to run a plus day, I was effectively added to the plus day of an AST1 course that ran at the same time as my backcountry ski course, which meant I would be skiing with four new people, with Niki guiding. I carpooled with Jessica, and she was great to chat with. Also joining us were Michael, Nick and Stuart.
It was back to Bow Summit for the fourth time in five days, as the conditions elsewhere weren’t looking great. However Bow Summit isn’t that bad of a place to tour so I wasn’t complaining. We did three runs in total, the first two reaching the same high point as I reached with Barry for my AST-1 plus day, and the snow was in really good shape for the first run, though it did get quite heavy with each subsequent run. Once again, really great conditions, though still very warm (I was down to a thin dry fit long sleeve and tights under my shell pants and with the zips down it was still a bit much!).
Definitely my best day skiing, really started to get the hang of the downhill powder skiing as well as moving through the glades. Shame it was my last day though…I really need to ski more consistently moving forward! After getting back to the cars, we shared photos and had a beer in the parking lot, and I was able to chat with Niki about my goals moving forward with ski touring/ski mountaineering and what her suggestions were. She was super helpful – she liked that I had a good base of fitness and that I needed some work on the technical aspects of skiing, which I absolutely agree with – it was a struggle at times after five years off! She liked my plan for next steps so I’m looking forward to putting that plan into motion!
After getting back to Canmore and returning the ski gear (Jessica also rented at Gear Up so it was convenient to go at the same time), we reconvened for dinner at the Wood Restaurant and were later joined by Michael. It was really great hanging out with the two of them before heading home (also not having to eat alone!)
Day 8 and Final Thoughts
I was up at 4:20am and on the road at 4:30am, having packed the night before. Smooth sailing to the airport and returning the car, and other than an hour delay departing Calgary, a smooth flight home! Spent the flight doing a bit of work as well as reading “Training for the New Alpinism”, a super great resource which will help guide my training moving forward. Greeted by snow in Toronto, of course.
Pretty good trip overall! The conditions weren’t the greatest being above zero for most of the skiing, however it was bluebird days every day, so can’t complain. Solid, and somewhat challenging conditions for learning backcountry skiing, as well as avalanche skills! And, of course, this trip wouldn’t have been the same without all the great people I skied with, especially my guides Barry and Niki.
Yamnuska claims that people who take their backcountry ski course won’t ever want to ski on a groomed run at the resort again, and I’m definitely leaning that way! I do need to improve my skiing in general, so I think I’ll be holding onto my downhill stuff for a little while yet. As of releasing this post, I’ve already dropped way too much money on a touring setup (skis, bindings and boots), and skiing will definitely be my winter and spring focus moving forward! Can’t wait til next winter already!
Veg 'n' Alpine 