Icefall Lodge – Flying in Jan 29 2011
Icefall Lodge is located North of Golden. The lodge sits at 1900m with 200 Sq Km of accessible terrain reaching elevations up to up to 3000m. Our group consisted of 18 people including a cook – Kelly Mager of Backcountry Bistro, who is an awesome cook and person! The original hut was built about 5 years ago and is pretty small and rustic. The larger hut has a lot more space, with three floors. We were easily accommodated in this space. Both huts have pee toilets, which is really nice. For the first half of the week we didn’t have to haul water from the creek, then the pump broke. There is also a sauna, but we were unable to get it very hot when the outside temperatures were below -15. The sauna was much hotter when it got warmer.
A nice hut, but could use some refinements. Still beats a snowcave!!
We had four people in our group ( Sharon, Lee, Stu and Rob) , and 12 from Calgary with 6 splitters! ( Danny, the organizer, Julie, Steve, Nic, Kim, Kim, Dana, Lynda, Ryan, Duncan from Prince Rupert, Mark and Anna from Vernon).
As one would expect from a hut in this area the terrain is huge. Tree-skiing is enormously varied with N, S and E facing runs surrounding the huts with between 300 – 500 m shots of lappable pillows on different aspects. Because we get to ski lots of trees in our “home” touring ranges, we took advantage of good weather to get into the alpine. The alpine has longish approaches and extensive glaciation so we planned accordingly and knocked off several of the classics that were easier to approach.
Images of the runs and some map information can be found HERE.
Other friends were up there before and they created a large map that you can download and print off HERE.
This is one of the maps:
There is a lot of terrain. Plenty of tree skiiing when the vis doesn’t make glacier travel appealing. Plenty of big tours when the conditions are right.
It snowed 70cm the Friday before we came in. Flying in on Saturday was slow due to weather. Then we had 4 clear days and 2 final powder days!
Our flight started at about 2:00, we were all in by 4:00 with time for one run near Kitchen Chutes #13 above the lodge.
Lee brought in his cream horns from Chalet Bakery
View from the Lodge
View behind the lodge
Snow did not suck.
Flyin day – Icefall Lodge from Lee Lau on Vimeo.