TRAVERSES OF THE COLUMBIA MOUNTAINS

There are eight grand traverses in the Columbia Mountains. A “grand traverse” is a wilderness route that follows a natural line through the crests of a mountain range, typically for 100 kilometres (62 miles) or more.
I have extracted some of these trips from articles in Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine (marked with an *). 

SHORT TRAVERSES
ROCKIES

Wapta Traverse, Rockies. 40 km
SELKIRKS
Bonnington Traverse, 45 km
Kokanee Traverse 32 km
Mulvey Basin to Drinnon Lakes
Devil’s Range Traverse
McKean Lakes to Black Prince/Mt Bor Col
Valkyr Traverse

Goat Range Traverse *
MONASHEES
Blanket Mountain to Avalanche Lake 
Okanagan Traverse
*

GRAND TRAVERSES
Columbias 700 km 1998 *

ROCKIES
Great Divide Traverse 320 km 1967 *
PURCELLS
Rogers Pass to the Bugaboos 130 km 1958 *
Purcells on Foot 280 km 2017 *
Purcells on Skis 387 km 2019 *

SELKIRKS
Selkirks on Skis 520 km 2016 *
Valhallas – Drinnon/Gwillim Lakes to Shannon Creek 52 km
Valhallas Run in One Day *
Valhallas on Skis
MONASHEES
Gold Range
Monashees on Skis 600 km 2021 *
CARIBOOS
South Cariboos Traverse 1984
COAST RANGE
Coast Range on Skis 2,015 km 2016 *

Most die-hard traversers are seeking to fill up their personal buckets; they’re forming truer versions of themselves. Like the Buddhist pilgrimage to Mount Kailash or the Muslim mission to Mecca, ski tours are essentially a vehicle towards enlightenment through a conscious choice to challenge yourself among fellow believers.

Our feet groan, blistered and corpse-like, after days of sweat-saturated imprisonment in plastic ski boots. The ache in our shoulders wrestles for dominance with the searing burn where our heavy pack straps rub. Lips and noses are doing their best bacon impressions after a few days on snowfields in the hot spring sun, and every muscle seems to protest each inch we travel, whether it is balancing on skins up a frozen slope or breaking trail in a shady, north-aspect valley. Avalanches, cornices, creeks and crevasses wait for a single misstep. With the weight on our backs, even a simple caught edge can pop a knee or send you sliding down an icy slope of doom.

Multi-day ski traverses entail setting out for days or weeks into wild mountains in full winter conditions. The snow and the cold, while they add their layers of risk, also make travel much easier in many ways, by covering alder, devil’s club, small creeks, glacial crevasses and other obstacles that make off-trail travel an impossibility, or at least unpleasant, during the summer months. Your shelter, a warm sleeping bag and sleeping mat, extra warm clothes, and a stove and fuel, plus mountaineering equipment, all must be carried on your back.

Unlike our daily lives, every single decision you make out there has an impact. That reality creates a clear line between black and white, almost like a hyper-real binary system.” -Kari Medig.

On a traverse, each morning boils down to a daily ritual whose only comfort is its familiarity. Awake to the beep of a watch alarm, the ache of dehydration countered only by the ironic throb of a dangerously full bladder. Peel yourself from a toasty sleeping bag, careful not to knock the ice from the inner tent walls onto your tent mates. Pull on a down jacket, ski pants, and slip into down booties. A familiar pump and spark lights the camp stove to melt snow for the day’s water, and more importantly, coffee. Ski-boot liners frozen solid are stuffed inside still-warm sleeping bags in the hopes they will at least partially thaw before feet are wedged into them. Use frozen fingers to pack up camp and stuff a rehydrated breakfast into a protesting stomach that needs the calories.

But hours later, lying on the trail and trading turns with your closest friends as far from the rest of the world as you can get, nothing feels more divine.

Steve Smith is one of the godfathers of modern ski touring in the Columbia Mountains. While others pioneered major ski routes — known as the “grand traverses” for their complexity, the required commitment and the stunning terrain through which they pass — few showed Smith’s dedication to the traverse specifically or connected so many mountain ranges with a ski track. Canadian mountain historian Chic Scott’s first edition of Summits and Icefields contains an entire section entitled “Steve Smith and Friends,” dedicated to these 1970s hard men.

Between 1977 and 1983, Smith completed ski traverses of the North and South Rockies, North and South Cariboos, North Selkirks and North and South Purcells. He also took part in a ski expedition to climb and circumnavigate Mount Logan in 1979, which was the first Mount Logan expedition since 1925 to summit without aircraft support. “There’s something about having a passion for wilderness and wild, untouched places that formed my drive to undertake expeditions on skis,” explains Smith. “But to me, the remarkable thing was that, for about a decade, I was not alone in that passion. There were these other individuals who somehow entered my life back then, complete weirdo types who got the same kick out of exploring wild country under their own steam as I did.”

For Smith, the essence of the traverse was the bond it formed with his fellow expedition mates. “My old friend Scott Duncan used to say that going to climb a big mountain somewhere was as much about the journey to that mountain as it was about climbing the mountain itself,” says Smith. “Maybe that’s also why we liked the idea of doing those expeditions under our own steam, without caches or food drops or helicopter access. It just fit with the richness of the wilderness setting and the whole business of being responsible for our well-being and safety.”

B2R-KariMedig-lores-3392

Kari Medig, a modern Kootenay ski bum whose photography takes him around the world, agrees with Smith, but adds his take on the powder pilgrimage. In addition to a host of shorter traverses, in 2002, Medig took part in the northern half of the 2,000-kilometre Vancouver-to-Skagway traverse, the longest ski traverse ever completed, then continued on another 700 kilometres to link up the Fairweather and St. Elias Ranges, summiting Mount Logan on the way as the token male on an all-girls expedition. “For me, there is something aesthetic about that simple ski line through complicated terrain, like putting yourself into a giant puzzle,” he explains. “Mountains are a place of real honesty. There is no trick, no fooling around. You have to be on the ball, in your best form.”

Medig sees mountains as a door to a reality that, for him, does not exist in everyday life. Unlike our daily lives, every single decision you make out there has an impact. That reality creates a clear line between black and white, almost like a hyper-real binary system.”

There is also an innate sense of reward for scraping the bottom of the energetic jam jar — a feeling of renewal.

“On a ski tour, you dig deep, burn out the carbon,” says Medig. “It’s one of the many aspects of a long tour that lets you connect deeper to yourself, and deeper to your companions, and when you do get back to life and start to recharge, the feeling of elation can last a long time.”

All these things are done within the setting of a smaller group, making decisions with friends, building a closer, more real relationship.

One difference for ambitious adventurers these days, though, is that many of Smith’s and even Medig’s traverses cannot be completed in the same manner they originally were. Deforestation and forestry roads have made access far easier, practically everywhere. A boon to most, for some, it softens the experience. In Smith’s era, a scant three decades ago, every ski tour, or even the approach to one, was an epic challenge.

“In the mid-70s,” explains Smith, “unless you planned to use a helicopter, getting in and out of the remotest parts of the Rockies and the Interior ranges was an exercise in itself. . . . The wilderness was contiguous and largely free of cut blocks. Nothing had changed in those places since the days of the first mountaineering pioneers and surveyors.”

These days, outside of a few small protected areas like the Purcell Wilderness Conservancy or our national parks, logging roads and cut blocks go to the back of every single valley. Along with this come snowmobile access, mechanized backcountry operations, more people and less solitude. For the purist, it can sometimes feel as if what is being sought has been sullied. Then again, it could be a reason to push deeper.

Douglas Noblet and Stephen Senecal have done full ski traverses of the Selkirks, 520 kilometres (323 miles) in 2016, the Purcells, 387 kilometres (240 miles) in 2019, and the Monashees (600 km) in 2021.

“The biggest draw for me is just getting to intimately know a mountain range,” says Noblet, who, when not skiing, works as a nature photographer, commercial pilot, and avalanche professional. He’s experienced firsthand in how the Monashee Range is “much skinnier than the Purcells or Selkirks.” He knows where the creeks flow, where the valleys connect, and where the subranges are. And he has a better understanding of the scale of it all. “Walking the entire length of the parks, you see how their size compares,” says Noblet. “The Purcell [Wilderness] Conservancy is a big one. And there’s only one small park in the Monashees compared to the Selkirks and the Purcells.”

For Noblet, the biggest challenge of extending grand traverses is the logistics, figuring out the route and planting the food caches. He uses Google Earth and Google Maps to fine-tune what appears to be the natural line and to account for cliffs and otherwise inaccessible terrain, and he gets feedback from local guides. He also solicits friends and people who will already be flying into the area, like a pilot with CMH Heli-Skiing, to deliver the caches, which are placed at areas where he expects to be every four to seven days. Next up for Noblet and Senecal is extending two existing grand traverses to ski the full length of the Cariboos. “Every two to three years is pretty comfortable timing between big trips like these,” Noblet says.

After all, not only does wilderness have a variable definition, but it is just one of many motivators for powder pilgrims. Perhaps, in this modern click-powered digital world, connection to yourself and others is an even more powerful driver than it was in the late-70s and offers more powerful rewards. Even the easiest traverse in the nicest weather and most stable snow still fills people’s buckets. Weeks later, typing away at our computers, or back behind the wheel, our minds still go euphoric with even the slightest thought of our time in wild winter.

We are seekers, willing to drop everything for the tour. It is something so powerful that it carves the sunbaked smile lines a little deeper each year as we belly laugh our way through yet another pilgrimage. Here, the journey is what matters most, so we keep taking it. The high-mountain routes of Western Canada are the most rewarding game of snakes and ladders ever. Have you got the salt to try them?

LONG WALK HOME
Six billion believers on Earth are on a steady march towards heaven. How far would you walk to ascend?
Amarnath Cave, Kashmir 
In the Himalaya Mountains of Kashmir, at nearly 4,500 metres, the snow melts for a short time every summer. Amid the thaw, a cave opens when an icy stalagmite serves as a natural shrine to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Up to 600,000 devotees walk the 141 kilometres from Rinnagar to this holy site each year to pay homage in the mountain’s cavernous sanctum.
Char Dham, India 
This casual 6,276-kilometre route will take you to the four sacred sights of India: Badrinath, Rameswaram, Dwarka and Puri. A quarter of a billion of the world’s billion Hindus take part each year, though some sections do require motorized transport. Shikoku, Japan 
At 1200 kilometres, this is one of the longest pilgrimages undertaken on foot. Complete the whole thing over 30 to 60 days, and you’ll have visited 88 temples dedicated to the Buddhist monk Kikai.
Arba’een, Iraq 
In 2015, this may have been the single most dangerous pilgrimage in the world. Despite car bombs and constant danger, 20 million Shiite Muslims still made the 500-kilometre trek from Basra to Karbala to honour a ritual that goes back 1,300 years.
Camino de Santiago, Spain “The Way of St James”
The Camino Frances is the 780 km route from St Jean Pied de Port, France that crosses the Pyrenees and ends at the tomb of St James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Three routes go through France, collecting all the routes originating in Scandinavia, Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe. These French routes meet at Ostabat, just north of St Jean Pied de Port.
The camino from Italy crosses the Pyrenees and joins the Camino Frances past Pamplona. At least 8 caminos originate in Spain and one in Portugal.
It’s estimated that 200,000 people per year undertake this Christian pilgrimage, many simply as tourists.
Hajj, Saudi Arabia 
One of the five pillars of the Muslim faith, the Hajj attracts two million pilgrims each year who pray vigorously along the 45-kilometre, multiday/return trek from Mecca to Arafat. When finished, they squeeze into the oldest mosque in the world for what’s considered the most significant human gathering on Earth.

I have adapted this article from several articles written by Dave Quinn in Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine. I love his descriptions of the work involved in a traverse.


Born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Dave is a wildlife biologist, educator, wilderness guide, writer and photographer whose work is driven by his passion for wilderness and wild spaces. His work with endangered mountain caribou and badgers, threatened fisher and grizzly, as well as lynx and other species, has helped shape his understanding of the Kootenay backcountry and its wildlife, and helped shape his efforts to protect what remains. His writing and photography have helped fill the pages of publications such as British Columbia Magazine, Westworld, the Financial Post, Backcountry, Adventure Kayak, as well as the Patagonia and MEC catalogues. Dave Quinn

 

 

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I would like to think of myself as a full time traveler. I have been retired since 2006 and in that time have traveled every winter for four to seven months. The months that I am "home", are often also spent on the road, hiking or kayaking. I hope to present a website that describes my travel along with my hiking and sea kayaking experiences.
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