2 bugs, 2 birds, & 2 fighter jets. If it sounds like a bad movie title, you're close, but rather, I was thinking it's the only signs of life we saw on our week long trip to climb & ski Mt Waddington, BC, just under 2 weeks ago.

Avid Whistler bakcountry skier Lee Lau put some of Dynafit's alpine touring boots to the test - the Zzero4 C-MF and Zzero3 C-TF. Here's the full lowdown:

May 16. 2007

Words by Lee Lau. Pictures by Lee Lau and Sharon Bader

While most of us are sitting on our butts waiting for winter to show up, Kit DesLauriers, Rob DesLauriers, David Hahn, Jimmy Chin & Bryce Brown just waltzed on over to this wee peek we like to call Mt Everest, and skied it. A first ever for a female. At least that's the details we've made out. It's all over the web, rather than spreading false rumours we'll let you read it for yourself...

Amidst a season that's making most BC skiers want to shoot themselves, there's still plenty of missions to be had if you're willing to work for it. This past weekend, for lack of anything better to do, we came up with the weekend's objective... The Super Couloir. Spotted on a past trip to Mt Atwell in the Diamond Head area above Squamish, this aesthetic 3,200 ft steeply walled couloir stands boldly in the distance beyond the Garibaldi-Neve traverse, where hundreds of mellow ski tour groups unknowingly pass in and out of it's view every spring. It had been haunting us for over a year. Snapshots became screensavers, topo maps were adroned with a big X marking the spot, and we added it to our lengthy 'to do' list for winters to come. Obsession, yes. The only thing we forgot to do was make not of how far it was...

"Ya, I'd like to spend a month on a mountain sometime... It'd be a good experience" I stated these exact words only a few months before we stepped off of the Beaver onto the SE Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier, in the Alaska Range.

The three of us chucked our gear into the slurpee-like snow and watched our plane take-off, making a huge arc in front of Mt. Foraker en-route home. We were amongst mountains I'd always dreamed of seeing. As I bent to grab a handful of gear I think it dawned on me for the first time what we were getting ourselves into. "Shit man, that's a big mountain". Kees didn't give me much of a reply save for a smile an some refrains from some country song he had rattling around in his head. Hmm... so I'm going climbing with a country fan? I wonder how many songs he knows? (ed: lots!)

Pat was a little jealous we bagged Mt Rainier two weeks earlier, so he tried to convince us to do it again. Jack and I wanted to ski, however we wanted to try something else. So the only way Pat could top the Rainier trip is if he went and skied two Volcanoes in one weekend. So that was the plan: Mt Adams then Mt Hood, in one weekend.

We hit the road around 7pm on Friday from Jacks house. We grabbed some half decent mexican food with huge mugs of beer on the way down. We kind of underestimated the length of the drive and rolled into camp at Cold Springs around 4:30am on Saturday morning. We set up camp quickly and went to sleep. Two hours later we woke up and started getting ready for the 7000ft climb ahead of us.

So ski season normally ends in before June...not this year. With over 28,000 ft of vertical in 4 runs, on 4 mountains (volcanoes) in the last 3 weeks...it seems like the ski season is in full swing. This year it started with Mt Rainier in the state of Washington. Mt Rainier is a massive 14,400 ft volcanoe in the Cascade range of the western United States. It's one of the biggest and most significant mountaineering objectives around. I was always under the false impression that it was unskiable...an then I decided to look into it. Turns out the Emmons Glacier runs up the north side of the mountain right to the summit. So after a couple months of debate the decision is made to go for it! Jack was up for the task, and it turned out we couldn't find anyone else who could make it down there the weekend of the June 15-16th so we went decided to go the '2 man rope team' approach.

Let's pretend we were up at 1 o'clock in the morning to get an early mountaineering start on our climb up the North-West Couloir of Wedge Mountain.  In reality, we were only awake at 1 am because we had just arrived at Wedgemount Lake and set up camp after a late 9pm start and some long headlamp-hiking in the dark. It wasn't ideal, but we'd all done the 3-4 hour hike up the Wedgemount Lake trail before, so climbing 1200m up this steep and rooted trail in the dark seemed like a splendid idea at the time.  Tired and sweating in the dark at 1 am, we threw our bags down on the first somewhat-flat rock we found, and called it 'camp' for the night. 

2900 metre peaks just off the Duffey Lake Road.  Drivable logging roads to 1500 metres and 4km from the summit!  Sounds too good to be true.  Well basically it was.  Jack and I had this great plan...there are a couple decent sized peaks, some of the highest in the south coast range, that look like worthy descents and had logging roads up to small lake at the foot of the mountains.  We then dug up a trip report on Bivouac.com that described the area, Dowton Creek drainage, and how easy it was to drive up a good way up.  Based on the fact that there's not much snow below 1500m this year we thought we'd give it a shot. 

"With each turn I sunk up to my nipples in snow... remember that feeling?"

After weeks of shreddin' the hardpack on Whistler/Blackcomb, skiing was getting old, so I set out on a mission to find some powder. I knew there wasn't even a drop of fresh snow in the resort, but what about the backcountry? Obviously my fellow resort skiers didn't have a clue, or they wouldn't still be skiing in-resort. But what about Red Neck Kurt who had just finished 2 weeks without a ski-pass? If there's any freshies to be had, he'd know where it's at.