After eyeballing one of the most tempting yet elusive ski routes in the region for much of the winter, a pair of Bow Valley ski mountaineers built up the courage to tackle the treacherous south face of Mount Bourgeau in Banff National Park on April 25.
Tackling the seldom-skied south face, Yan Kaczynski and Alex Gosselin completed the 1,200 metre decent from the summit to the Bourgeau Left ice climbing route.
Kaczynski, a former ski instructor and racer, and Gosselin planned the trip for months, mapping out a potential route by taking photos of the potential route from Sunshine. However, the preparation didn’t prepare them for the journey that lay ahead.
The duo began at 3:30 a.m., heading up the regular scramble route. By 6 a.m., they had traversed the avalanche paths above Bourgeau Lake under the rising sun, bootpacking on sun-affected snow.
By 7:30 a.m., they reached the scramble past Harvey Pass and began to make their way up to the summit ridge. However, two hours later, after reaching the summit ridge, a storm blew in, creating whiteout conditions. The skiers struggled to find their entrance.
“It’s a wide ridge in the summer, but has a huge cornice in the winter. We were thinking we would turn around,” said Kaczynski.
However, the weather cleared for a four-minute window, and the duo seized the opportunity, dropping into the ice slope.
“We looked at each other and found our entrance and went,” he said.
“It was steeper than we thought. Our original plan was to contact Sunshine ski patrol to see if they could watch for us, but conditions were too bad,” Kaczynski said.
The slope varied from 40 to 50 degrees and the two had to traverse over the prow to get a straight shot down the mountain. After the slope, they entered glades, navigating a maze of tight trees, cliffs and canyons.
“It was our biggest route this year,” Kaczynski said, noting they will now depart to ski Andromeda on the Columbia Icefields.
After speaking with many ski patrollers in the area, Kaczynski believes very few people, if anyone, has skied the line, which proved to be tougher than the duo thought, in 20 years.
“The big line is in the steepest part of the mountain. The slope was 50 degrees and parts were pure ice,” Kaczynski said.
There are several reasons the south face is so rarely skied, Kaczynski said: expansive cornices on every aspect of the mountain, a gruelling, uncertain approach and years where a lack of snow makes the route impossible. However the duo, both originally from Quebec, felt conditions warranted a trip this year.
“With the recent warming and deep snowpack, it is now go time for those big lines we have been looking at all year. Some of those lines have not been in shape for many years and might not be for years to come,” Kaczynski wrote on the ski mountaineering website www.biglines.com.
The online ski community doubts this is a first decent for the route, but certainly a rare run down a difficult line.
For more photos of the route, visit www.biglines.com and follow the links to the Bourgeau run.
