Peyto Hut – Peyto Lake. 10km. 550m altitude lost. 4hrs.
This morning was another sleep-in morning, especially as it looked so cloudy and miserable outside. It had been quite windy overnight as well, which would mean unpleasant wind-affected snow to ski on.
After some extended lazing around, and a very slow breakfast (included a nice cup of tea) we wandered out towards Mt Rhondda, decided the snow was a bit rubbish and there was no visibility so there was no point skiing to the top of the mountain, and just did a run down from where we were.
I was unimpressed with the snow, and Alex wanted to dig a hole, so Amy went off and did another run while Alex occupied himself with digging and I occupied myself with watching.
He dug down to the glacier underneath – over 2.5 metres below the surface.
We all hopped in the hole and confirmed that there was indeed a glacier in it, then hopped out again, filled in the hole, and skiied back to the hut for lunch.
My ski had been feeling a bit odd, and when I took it off at the hut I noticed the binding was a bit wiggly. We unscrewed it from the ski, and realised that two of the screws holding it to the ski had sheared off. Well this was a bit unfortunate. The only allen key we had with us was too rubbish to loosen any of the other screws, so we only had two to work with. Luckily K2 telemark skis have more than one set of insets in them, so you have the option to place your binding in two different locations on the ski. So I reattached the binding a little further forward, with one screw at the front, one at the back, and hoped it would hold.
After that issue had prolonged our lunch, we set off into the white. Visibility wasn’t particularly terrible, it just wasn’t particularly good either. As we started heading downhill, I spent as much of my time skiing on one leg as I could, trying to avoid applying much weight or twisting forces to my gimpy binding.
We got off the glacier, and then it was skis off as we started hiking out over the moraine. A quick explore around the glacial research huts, and then we kept hiking – eventually giving in on the idea of carrying our skis, and just shoving them in our packs, as we kept crossing from snow to rock to snow to dirt.
We got our first glimpse of Peyto Lake, then it was a steep descent down to reach it – done mostly on foot by me, not wanting to risk my binding.
So, we were back in the land of trees again. Skiing across the lake it was odd to have a frame of reference to make our progress so noticeable again. Skiing across the lake I decided that even with a frame of reference, the lake seemed unnecessarily long and irritating to ski across. I don’t mind skiing uphill, and I don’t mind skiing downhill, but this shuffling across long flat surfaces just gets a bit tedious.
Luckily, the tedium finally ended, and there was just the final kilometre through the trees to get to the car. It was an interesting steep and winding track through trees, which wasn’t as always as easy to follow as we would have thought, but after some interesting close encounters with trees, we finally popped out at the car park. Back to civilisation. Boo! I was secretly hoping we were just going to end up at another hut, freshly stocked with food for us, so we could continue our journey.
