Feature- The Wild West

Dan Treadway. Mellow Steeps. PHOTO: BRYN HUGHES

THE WILD, WILD WEST

There’s no better way to channel the real Whistler-Blackcomb than on one of the many classic backcountry descents to be reached from it.

By Leslie Anthony

For those around the world who don’t know much about Whistler-Blackcomb, viewing the 2010 Olympics on television will introduce them to a resort that knows no peer in North America. Skiers and snowboarders will immediately understand that these mountains offer vertical to spare, and that the awe-inspiring pistes are perfect for the speed races they’re watching. But what they likely won’t meet is the real mountain and its neighbours: the vertiginous jumble of peaks, bowls, glaciers, and rocky chutes known as the Coast Range. For many locals, this has always been the draw of Whistler. In fact, if it hadn’t been for people coming here over the years to access off-piste terrain both inside and outside of the resort, Whistler would not enjoy the Chamonix-like fruits of a bad-ass reputation, would not have developed as it did, and, very likely, would not be hosting an Olympic Games.

Around here, it’s just as much about what you can hike, tour, sled, cat, or heli to, as what you can hit from the chairlift.

Let’s start with DOA, the 300-metre slash cleaving the southwest corner of Blackcomb Peak. The longest couloir accessible from any ski area in North America, DOA is also the most aesthetic, both in terms of the descent and the view to the peaks and glaciers of Garibaldi Park. It’s the kind of walk-to place that longtime locals like Pete ‘The Swede’ Mattsson eagerly dragged me to when I first moved here. Off Blackcomb alone, an hour or less of hiking can get you to a dozen other classic descents such as: AIDS on Disease Ridge, the Finger Chutes on Decker Mountain, Corona, The Poop Chutes, and Husume (reportedly an appellation referring to its first conquerors Hugh Tucker, Sue Boyd, and a guy named Miguel who named it after ‘Hugh, Sue, and Me’). This is the real Whistler.

DOA is the big groove on the right. PHOTO: ANDREW BRADLEY

That Mattsson has skied and climbed almost every inch of the seemingly infinite Whistler backcountry was evident on one memorable tour during the World Ski & Snowboard Festival a few years back. After an hour of lift-riding, followed by a brief boot-pack and traverse across the top of Blackcomb Glacier, we assembled our touring gear and headed up the long zigzag behind Blackcomb Peak. Ripping off our climbing skins at the top, The Swede led over a blind, 50-degree roller, and down a short face resplendent in deep, cold, April powder. We skipped across a short saddle to the top of Johnny’s Jam, a long pencil-couloir named after the first of The Swede’s buddies to balk at the sketchy entrance and deep-cut, no-fall walls.

Descending the couloir without incident, we tracked across a big, south-facing apron, then straightlined down to a frozen lake.

Mt Tremor. PHOTO: BRUCE ROWLES

“Back in the eighties, so few people were skiing Blackcomb that we had powder three and four days after a storm – even for a week if you hiked or toured,” Mattsson enthusiastically explained as we lunched in the sun outside an ice cave at the foot of Decker Glacier. He recalled the relatively small group of off-piste pioneers: hardcores like Eric Pehota, Trevor Petersen, Steve Smaridge, Beat Steiner, the Charon brothers, and Peter Chzranowski.

“We skied really hard and partied harder because there wasn’t much else to do,” Mattsson said, laughing. “It was like a cowboy town – the Wild West. We were doing crazy things that no one had done before. Adventure was life. It was pretty much like a movie.”

A global recession in the Eighties hit Whistler hard, but things picked up around 1988, as the town’s reputation grew. Mattsson and company were too busy to care, bagging big peaks and racking up a huge list of first descents. After an hour of slogging up the steep, north-facing Decker Glacier and cresting the summit, The Swede enumerated descents on every horizon with his usual brio – including wild gesticulations.

Johnny ‘Foon” Chilton, Decker Mountain. PHOTO: BRUCE ROWLES

“One time I was on that face over there,” he spat, “and f–king Pehota buzzed me in his plane. He flew so close I thought he was going to knock me off.” Johnny ‘Foon’ Chilton, another long-time local ski-mountaineer, remembers this plane-buzzing event on Mount James Turner, further north, and recalls he and Darrell White stood at the top while Swede floundered on the face looking for a lost ski. Whenever you start delving into 20-year-old local lore, some stories, locations and dates are bound to get crossed up, confused, exaggerated or sometimes straight-up fabricated. It’s only natural – back in those days, no one was taking notes.

But there were truly noteworthy lines getting skied. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, Trevor Peterson and Eric Pehota were the most recognizable Canadian ski-film heroes and extreme-ski rock stars, forever equated with Whistler’s big-mountain ethos. The pair may have been synonymous with many first descents, but few were as coveted as the big north face of Mount Fitzsimmons.

“That was the coup of the whole area,” Pehota remembers. “It was ’87, or maybe ’89. We climbed the face before we skied it, only the second ascent. Don Serl climbed it first in ‘85, I think. He called it ‘the biggest ice face in southwestern British Columbia.’”

“Trevor always said that that the face of Fitzsimmons was the steepest, most consistent and aesthetic descent in the area,” says photographer Bruce Rowles, who has been skiing and shooting these peaks for 20-plus years.

No coincidence that Fitzsimmons is near the apex of the U-shaped Spearhead Traverse linking Whistler and Blackcomb, the backcountry route that holds the key to many a first descent. Starting the tour at Blackcomb you first pass Decker then, in order, the peaks of Trorey, Pattison, Tremor, Shudder, Quiver, MacBeth, Iago, Fitzsimmons, Benvolio, Overlord, Whirlwind, Fissile, Cowboy Ridge, and finally, the Musical Bumps before spilling onto Whistler Mountain.

“The whole Spearhead is loaded with classics – known and unknown,” says accomplished ski-mountaineer Lisa Korthals, looking over a Whistler backcountry map that actually lists first descents and those who’ve accomplished them. Lisa’s husband Johnny Foon has claimed a number of first descents in the area, many with longtime ski partners and close friends Jia Condon and Rich Prohaska. Johnny and Jai were the first to ski the steep, narrow central couloir on Mount Tremor, one of the Spearhead’s many skiable peaks.

Steve Leeder, Decker Lake. PHOTO: BRUCE ROWLES

Big mountains mean big adventures and Bruce Rowles has found himself in some hairy situations, even in zones he knows well like the Spearhead Traverse.

“I fell down the Saddle Chute on Fissile one summer. A binding pre-released and I skipped down the sun-cupped face, over some rocks and five crevasses, then scorpioned into the last one. I thought I’d broken my back but was able to make it back to the cabin at Russett Lake. Search and Rescue came but they thought I was okay so they left me at the cabin and I walked out the next day. The doctors in town thought I was okay and I had to fight with them to get an x-ray. It turned out I had four broken vertebrae.”

His list of stories and takes on local descents is endless:

“I like the big glacier face on Rainbow Mountain, and being able to ski right back down to Alpine [a Whistler neighbourhood] is pretty cool,” Rowles says. “That’s where we took Kye Petersen [Trevor’s son, now a ski star in his own right] for his first heli trip.”

Guy Simard on Rainbow Mountain with Blackcomb in the background. PHOTO: Bruce Rowles

“Armchair Mountain is another real scenic face and has long been an objective of the local hardcores,” Rowles explains, adding that Armchair sits in Garibaldi Park, a non-motorized zone, so with no adjacent ski hill getting in and out is a multi-day affair.  “Jeff Holden [One-time Whistler local and two-time world freeskiing champion] was eyeing up those lines for a long time – they’re big feeder chutes with mandatory airs at the bottom. He did manage to ski one of the fingers off the main chute a few years back.”

“But I think the classic local descent is the northwest couloir on Wedge,” Rowles says. “When Foon skied it he said it was the steepest entrance he’d ever done up to then but once you’re in it’s okay – though … people have been killed there.”

The line is best seen from the highway beside Green Lake near the turnoff for Cougar Mountain, and these days accounts of skiing Wedge show up on blogs and chat rooms all the time.

“I skied it with Steve Smaridge,” says Beat Steiner, now a partner with The Swede in Bella Coola Helisports. “We left super early, hiked up Wedge, skied the couloir, then skied out through a logging slash and down through the trees in the dark with a headlamp.”

Steiner’s best epic involves another favourite: the north face of Mount Currie, which he and Pete Chzranowski were the first to descend from the summit ridge. Rob Rodgers and a friend are rumoured to have gotten to it first but most people credit Steiner and Chzranowski with the line.

“One May two-four weekend we climbed up the farthest gully lookers-left, then into The Dogleg, a prominent couloir you can see from down the road. We hiked straight up the gully – not smart because rocks were winging down past us – because it was the most direct approach. Then we dug out a platform in a giant snow fan that had an angle of about 35 degrees and next day hiked up The Dogleg onto the summit ridge. We skied down the same way, in 30 centimetres of beautiful, completely protected north-face snow.”

A couple of years later Steiner returned to Currie to film Trevor and Eric’s first descent of the Y Couloir, a route off the summit that required a 30-metre rappel to enter. “It’s probably 65 degrees mixed rock and ice,” Eric Pehota says of the entrance. “Some years it fills in better, I’ve skied it clean since, but that time we rappelled.”

So while the in-bounds runs like Franz’s, McConkey’s, and the Dave Murray Downhill may ring with history and founder spirit, much of the real pioneering at Whistler went on outside its boundaries (we won’t even mention all the classics now in permanent closure on both mountains: Don’t Miss and Weekend Chutes on Whistler; Satisfaction, Back in Black and CC on Blackcomb).

The on-hill stuff looks great on TV but step outside the rope, go for a bit of a walk, and it’s the Wild West indeed.

Tagged as: big mountain, COAST MOUNTAINS, Spearhead traverse, Touring, Whistelr Blackcomb