Revelstoke experiences: The Asulkan Cabin

No good adventure should start smooth and finish easy. But when you are fortunate enough to have the entire Asulkan Cabin booked out for two days you make it work.

The cabin can sleep 10 and is maintained by the Alpine Club of Canada. As of this writing the Asulkan Cabin is completely booked until April 20, 2017.

The Asulkan Valley offers some of the best riding in Rogers Pass. Areas like Young’s Peak, the Seven Steps of Paradise, Dome Glacier, Asulkan Glacier, Sapphire Col, the Pterodactyl and the Triangle Trees are all accessible from the Asulkan Cabin.

Some of the best riding in Rogers Pass is accessible from the Asulkan Cabin. Photo: Nick Khattar

At an elevation of 2,100 metres, the cabin sits at the foot of the Illecillewaet Glacier. From the Asulkan parking lot you follow the Asulkan Brook Trail for 6.5 kilometres.

With only 898 metres of elevation gain it is not an overly technical route. However, being my first splitboard mission of the year, with nothing more than a few days on my board and a few games of Revelstoke Beer League Hockey under my belt, the trek was gruelling.

All I had brought was seven sandwiches, a sleeping bag, one litre of water, two litres of scrambled eggs, one camera, three lenses and one battery.

But the hike in was awful. Splitboarding can be really awful sometimes. Actually, most times. But I survived and somehow even managed to get out for a sundown ride up the 7 Steps of Paradise.

On day two myself Danny Leblanc, Seb Grondin and Chuck Morin aimed for a 2,672-metre unnamed peak at the end of the Asulkan Glacier.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached the saddle of the Asulkan Pass the weather was starting to close and we had to abandon our plans. Instead, in the last scraps of sunlight, the boys took a party lap down the southeast shoulder of the pass.

Backcountry skiing in Rogers Pass. Photo: Nick Khatter

Back inside the cabin that night the skins hung from the loft like prayer flags while the drying outerwear made a formidable maze of the main floor. In silence and damp warmth we ate curry and drank hot water and whiskey.

That night while the rest of us played endless games of Uno and Pig Bowling, Seb, Chuck, Dan Kennedy and Philippe Bélanger-Lamontagne were bagging face shots in the dark down the Pterodactyl variation of the The Seven Steps of Paradise.

On our last day in Asulkan we decided to spend the day hiking and riding pillows in the Triangle Trees as the light was too flat to ride any alpine.

Pillow lines make a hard splitboarding trek worth it. Photo: Nick Khattar

The gulley had substantially more snow than the upper valley and alpine and we rode it until there wasn’t much left to smash.

I wish I could say the trip ended on that super awesome pow-filled note but the truth is: it did not. The ride down was so insanely brutal. It’s just sloping enough to make skinning impractical. Thus split-skiing (skiing on your split board) is only logical.

Split-skiing on pow is actually fun. Split-skiing on a hard-packed side-hill skin track with a 50-pound pack after hiking pillows all day, is absolutely terrifying.

It was so dangerous that on one of the last sharp turns my skis crossed and I went head first into a snow bank narrowly missing a massive boulder. At the speed I was going, it definitely would have killed me.

Spend three days riding in some of the gnarliest avalanche terrain in North America, but it’s the ski out that you have to worry about. Classic Rogers Pass.

This article was first published in the January issue of the free Revelstoke Mountaineer Magazine.