WINTER TRAVERSE OF THE MONASHEES

The Monashees have long been considered the holy grail of the grand traverses.
On May 7, 2022, Douglas Noblet, Stephen Senecal, and wildlife biologist Isobel Phoebus completed a 600-kilometre (373-mile) traverse of the entire Monashee Mountains range from Grand Forks to Clemina Creek, near Valemount, in 37 days.

In 2004, Greg Hill, Aaron Chance, and Ian Bissonett completed the northern portion in 21 days. They bagged a whopping 21 peaks en route, and about 30,000 vertical metres (98,425 feet), but they only travelled 210 kilometres (130 miles) between Revelstoke and Valemount.

Noblet and his team’s version nearly tripled the distance and clocked in at 42,000 vertical metres (137,795 feet) of elevation gain. That’s the equivalent of 12 trips from Mount Everest’s base camp to its summit in just over a month.

Noblet and Senecal have also done full traverses of the Selkirks—520 kilometres (323 miles)—in 2016, as well as the Purcells—387 kilometres (240 miles)—in 2019. “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. But 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.

Stephen Senecal on an early-morning walk up the Big Eddy glacier after picking up a food cache on the first-ever traverse of the Canadian portion of the Monashee Mountain Range in 2022. Douglas Noblet photo.

Stephen Senecal cruxing out on the north side of Mount Tilley as the team navigates its way down onto the Trans-Canada Highway in 2022. Douglas Noblet photo.