Matt and had talked about the possibility of having a grand adventure in the Coast Range during the Christmas Break.  The Coast Range is an object of my eternal longing; the high u-shaped valleys and the cirques emerging from glaciers create a feeling of endless expanse.  Since it's too long a drive from Seattle for a weekend outing having a few days off makes an excellent excuse for a trip up north.  Then Phil and some of his Canadian friends generously invited us to stay with them in a cabin they had rented up in Valemount.  We would be meeting them closer to New Year's, so Matt and I schemed to leave a few days early, go for a multi day trip somewhere near Duffy Lakes, and then continue north to Valemount for even more skiing.

After pouring over maps and guidebooks, we reasoned the Place Glacier would make an excellent objective.  I had been up Cerise Creek and skied the fabulous bowl above it a couple years ago, but that was more of a day trip and we really wanted to get back into some serious wilderness - miles from nowhere in a winter wonderland.  After driving for much of the 26th we looked for the logging road that would take us to the trailhead.  It was covered with two feet of snow over slick slushy ice, but we eventually navigated it after putting chains on my 4x4.  As we enjoyed a dinner of burritos we noticed taillights in the distance through the trees.  This didn't make sense since the correct road would have taken us far from the highway.  The next morning we figured it out and started hiking down the correct road which is now thickly overgrown with alder and covered with loose sugary snow you could post-hole in with skis on.  The overgrowth and sugary snow together made progress extremely slow, and sometimes we tried to go faster by getting off the road only to get stuck in thinly covered talus slopes.  We spent the first half of the 27th fighting our way to the end of the road and the second half trying to climb a steep wooded slope to reach a high valley.  Again the unusually thin snow cover slowed our progress by leaving downed logs and saplings exposed.  When we realized we only had half an hour of daylight left we started to break camp.  Because of the steep slope and thin snow we had to build up a platform for the tent rather than dig in.
 

The overgrown road and Matt trudging.

The next morning further ascent seemed pointless.  We packed up and gingerly skied back down the wooded slope and hiked out.  We looked at the mileage again on the map (or kilometerage as we're talking about Canadian maps here) and it still didn't seem that far.  In better conditions it might have been doable.
 

Occasionally the smoke cleared enough to provide a tantalizing view of our objective.  Place Glacier is actually on the far side of this distant lofty mass.

Once again ambition had to bow down to reality.  As Matt summarized, "Evidently the Place Glacier does not yield her pleasures easily."  That's OK, we got plenty of great skiing in by the Valemount cabin, but that's another story.
 

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