Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

December 6, 2015

1895m

Manning Provincial Park, BC

Bojo Mountain is a little bit higher and about 2 km further than the nearby Grassy Mountain but still, it’s a very easy day-trip from the Manning Park ski resort, both in summer and in winter. Alex, Ben and I ascended it on skis after summitting Grassy Mountain. The weather was as expected, snowy, windy and miserable and the trail-breaking was massive thank to the recent heavy snowfall.. The conditions weren’t much better neither (Considerable/Considerable/Moderate) but the terrain was very mellow so there’s not much worry.

And thank to the low visibility the terrain was quite confusing. In short time we ended up making a circle along the ridge/plateau and the next time I checked my GPS we were skinning backwards along our tracks (mistakenly thought it was some other groups tracks)…. But thankfully we corrected ourselves and from now on we had to check GPS for every 5 minutes or so. We didn’t make any further mistake but as mentioned earlier, the trail-breaking was exhausting. The ridge was also a bit further than expected and it took us quite a while to get there.

No view from the summit so we immediately started the descent. The skiing off the summit was very short and we couldn’t gain much speed in that heavy and wet powder. Back to our skin tracks upwards towards Grassy Mountain the wet and sticky snow started to ball underneath the skins and it was quite frustrating. I ended up having to take the skis off several times to scrap off the snow. Thankfully the skiing off Grassy Mountain was better than expected following our tracks. Back to the resort we picked an easy line down and now what? It’s only 1 pm.

The original plan was to ascend the nearly unofficially named “Mara Peak” but given the state of Ben’s skins it’s apparent that he couldn’t do any more uphill on this day. So the decision was made to spend the rest of the day resort skiing. It was quite an expensive exercise and certainly not something I’d do often, but on the upside I did get a lot of practice including a few laps down the black runs.. I was super tired by the time we finished (~4 pm) and that’s the end of a very productive bad-weather-bad-condition day.