Selkirk Mountain Experience, March 2020 (Part 1)
- Keith Nussbaum
- Mar 19, 2020
- 7 min read
This past week, I had the privilege of traveling up to Revelstoke, Canada, for a week of extreme touring and skiing with Selkirk Mountain Experience on 96 kilometers of their privately held land of endless peaks and glaciers, completely isolated from the world below. Sharing this experience with my brother and my parents was such a privilege and I cannot thank them enough for being a part of it and for sharing their love for the outdoors with me. Although this trip was very much meant to be my time with family away and off-grid, I was determined to capture as much as I could with a single battery charge of a DSLR equipped with a 24-70mm f/4 lens and my phone camera.
What follows is my journal of the week we had up there in the Canadian Rockies. This account is by no means exhaustive, just a stream of thought as I reflected on each day, often at times when I was too stoked to sleep.
March 7th, 2020
I didn't realize until after the trip that there was no journal kept for the first day. I was simply too awestruck while beginning this experience that although it was a long day, it passed in an instant. Quickly, for the sake of context, here's what happened. Guests met in the hotel lobby of the Revelstoke Best Western Plus at 6am in full ski clothing, boots on, and no more than 30 pounds of personal luggage for the week. We signed waivers, got weighed in, and mingled with the other guests until we were loaded into vans and transported to the loading dock, from where we got helicoptered in to the chalet. After getting settled in and going through introductions, we opted outside to review avalanche safety and take a short tour in the deteriorating weather conditions. We received our daily routine for the next week, with a few exceptions to those touring to the remote huts, but even then would the timing of daily activities stay similar.
Each day would look something like:
6:00 am: Make lunch and prepare equipment for the day
7:00 am: Sit down for breakfast
8:00 am: Outside ready to go. Skins (adheesive sleeves that stick to bottoms of skis or split-boards that enables them for uphill walking with traction) on or off, per guide's instructions.
2-3pm: finish tour for the day and arriving at destination for the evening.
6:30pm: Dinner.
Outside of these set items and the routes the guides would plan for the day, it was up to us to choose how else to fill our time. Being in bed by 8:30 would be a nightly occurrence so that you could rest and recover for the next day ahead. Stretching and yoga were highly recommended a couple times a day as well.
The guests split into three groups and the group I was in, with my family and three other individuals, went with a guide up to our first peak of the trip, Woolsey Peak, perched up at 2476m. The tour up was brutal, even though we were only gaining about 500m during the trip. Heavy winds and near white-out conditions presented a sense of vertigo as we followed our guide, who's familiarity of the area kept us calm. 10m below the summit of Woolsey Peak, we took of our skis and left them behind as we boot packed our way up the bone rocky peak. At the top, we had a quick celebration in the roaring winds and steady snowfall and descended back to our skis to ski our way back to the chalet for the day. I'm sure the view from the peak was nice, but we couldn't see more than 50m ahead of us. Luckily, we would be returning to that area later on in the week in better viewing conditions.
Back at the chalet, we sat down for dinner and Ruedi announced that with the weather lifting for the next day or two, he was confident that we could make a successful trip to the two remote huts in the SME operation, both a full day's tour from the home base chalet. Anxious yet excited for my first hut-to-hut tours, I stretched myself towards clarity before turning out the light at 8:45pm for my last night of warm sleep for a few days.
March 8, 2020
Our home base for the week is the Durrand Glacier Chalet, a fully functioning cabin with running water, reliable furnace heat, and a full kitchen equipped to feed 16 guests and 5 staff. WiFi was available a few hours a day but only worked for sending out a single message once every ten minutes or so. The owner/head guide of Selkirk Mountain Experience is a Swiss-born, small yet densely built, full-fledged mountain man, Ruedi. He came to Canada after hearing of its endless mountains on a mechanic visa and quickly found himself carving out a life for himself in the mountains. He built this home base in the mid 1980's, after finding the perfect knoll at the edge of treeline in the low alpine, away from immediate avalanche danger.
The Durrand Glacier Chalet from the helicopter pad. All food, linen and supplies had to be flown in with the guests and all waste flown out. Staff housing off to the left.
Ruedi holds tenure for 96 square kilometers of mountains in this area that he calls home.
He has explored and learned every crevasse, glacier, peak and slope in the tenure; mapping and hand picking his favorite areas to share with his guests. Perched up at 1900m, the only way in and out of the chalet is via helicopter. This is his 35th season leading the Selkirk Mountain Experience, which runs for 16 weeks during the winter months for ski touring, as well a summer session that’s meant for hiking, rock climbing, and mountaineering. While the home base chalet features some comfy living, the two remote chalets are smaller and much more rustic, relying on wood burning furnaces for heat and no running water. We were told to prepare for some cold nights ahead by guests who had made the trek out before. Today, we’re heading out to the Empire Lake Chalet, the most recent addition to the SME structures being built in 2014, equipped with solar panels that would let us use wired lights in two rooms at a time. Woke up 7am, made three day's worth of lunches, loaded my backpack to its absolute capacity with extra clothes, a sleeper sheet (a literal bedsheet we toured with that we use to keep the bedding clean at the other chalets), some communal food that we had to pack in/out from the chalets, and my camera. We had some pretty inclement weather yesterday but as soon as I woke up I could tell that weather was going to improve for the next two days. After eating breakfast at 8, I put on all my equipment for the day and went outside and took pictures until it was time to leave.Walking outside this brisk morning I finally got to enjoy the picturesque views in prime conditions. Yesterday's weather hid the epic panorama view, but today's weather was highlighting those features in the early morning sun.
My first views of Tumbledown Mountain, to the North of the chalet, simply took my breath away.
Finally enjoying the views from the Durrand Glacier Chalet, I couldn't look away from this natural beauty. Luckily, this wouldn't be the last time I'd wake up to a view like this.
We were skins on and touring out from the Durrand Glacier Chalet at 9am (an hour later to account for spring forward) and made our way out to the Emerald Lake Chalet. We started off on the same path as the two other groups, but split off pretty early on as the two other groups were not making the hut trip yet. These remote chalets could only house one group of 8 people at a time. During the day it was partly clear with lifting clouds and frequent winds with some light precipitation.
We climbed about 1200 meters as we approached a couple different peaks, including some moments of very technical touring aspects. We had to tour up some steep glades on the neighboring side of the Durrand glacier as well as tour along some breathtakingly skinny ridges that had dire consequences for slips. Although each of these features were scary as we approached, the adrenaline rush got me through all parts successfully, feeling confident and moving forward without psyching myself out.
The views at the top were chilling an rewarding at the same time.
After touring 1200m vertical, seeing a tiny chalet nested at the bottom of the glacier in the flat section, next to a lake that’s exposed during the non-winter months, was quite a rewarding view.
Our run down was some of the best snow I’ve ever skied.
We got to the chalet at 2pm and Ruedi gave us the rundown for remote-chalet living and then he started making NACHOS for us. This chalet had solar power electricity, yet no heat nor running water, so the inside of the chalet was just as chilling as the world outside when we first arrived. Thankfully, this kept the bulk-stored food well preserved. The other guides shoveled out the chalet and filled trash cans with snow that we would use for water throughout the afternoon and night. It got super windy shortly after arriving so I decided against taking photos, but chatted for a couple minutes with the other guides who were digging out the chalet on all sides. The hut was freezing cold but warmed quickly after we started a fire, drank tea and hot cocoa.
Ruedi cooked sausages and Rӧsti, a Swiss potato dish that is best described as a cross between a potato pancake an hash browns, for dinner. Exhausted from the long day, we were all in bed by 7:45 pm. Outside the window of the shared bunk room, a full moon and a clear night of stars danced across the sky that illuminated the snowy mountains and pristine glaciers below. I stargazed from inside the chalet with one of the guides for a couple minutes and then went to bed, with my first remote hut-to-hut tour day ahead tomorrow.
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