CODY SHIMIZU

A look into my life, a journal to look back on, a blog for others to see.

Date: Feb 21 2020
Type: Ski Tour
Difficulty: Black Diamond
Distance: 12.95 Km
Elevation: 1300m
Car to Car: ~5-8 hrs
Where: Highway 93S, Kootney National Park
Gear: Standard Touring Things, Ice Axe, and Crampons

Since I started touring the popularity of highway 93N has overshadowed the skiing potential of Highway 93S. This year since I bought the HI Wilderness pass I had been staying at HI Castle Mountain almost every second weekend. It sits right at the turn off for highway 93S. With the season being cut off early with COVID-19 and some cool objectives on the to-do list for 93N Vermillion peak was the only chance that I had to go touring on highway 93S. It’s such a cool little area, I’m definitely planning on spending some more time here next year.

It was the end of my reading week trip with Evelyn and Jason. We woke up to a pretty beautiful morning with blue skies, a bit chiller then we had hoped but it would warm up to close to freezing for a pretty pleasant day. From Castle Junction we drove ~21Km to the Painted Pots parking lot. From there cross the highway and put your splitboard on and you’ll skin on an old gravel road of sorts all the way around till the west face of Vermillion peak. From there the lower section makes for a great place to get laps in. It was evident from how tracked out the area was.

The skin track follows the edge of the run out for a while until a choke. By the sounds of things early season it cliffs out a bit but by the time we got around to it, it was filled in enough to make our way down. But considering that it was relatively steep, tracked out and we couldn’t assess overhead hazards we opted to skin up through the trees. The up track was one of the worst I’ve ever experienced, all the Christmas sized trees made for slow going, short steep sections with slick tight kick turns. It was a bush whacking nightmare which made for some pretty slow progress.

Finally once we reached around 2000m the Christmas sized trees disappeared and we were left kick turning our way up through a burnt forest with sparsely spaced out trees. It was magical up there, beautiful soft pow, trees spaced out just perfectly. The views down the valley were incredible as well. From here it’s a fairly straight forward ascent making your way up. As you near the top you’ll start trending to the right to gain the summit ridge. From there it’s a cautious walk to the summit, unfortunately for us the summit ridge was a hard pack that no ski boot was stiff enough to kick into. Without crampons it would be unfeasible to go all the way to the top. So we were about 50 vertical meters shy from the summit when we had to turn around.

At least for us we had a beautiful 1000+m run all the way back! The snow near the top was what dreams are made of. Untracked pow, like floating in the clouds. Once we made it back down and past the terrain trap everything went south. It was so unbelievably tracked out, I might as well have been at Marmot. Absolutely beautiful tour, well worth doing again other then the terrible skin track through the trees. Hopefully I’ll be back to actually get to the top of Vermillion peak and enjoy the run all the way to the bottom.

Here are some other great trip reports/beta!
https://alpinejournals.com/2014/01/26/vermillion-peak-ski-ascent/
https://www.backcountryskiingcanada.com/Kootenay%20National%20Park