Mt Balfour PRiSM trip

To say we left with low expectations is an understatement… forecasts had very high overnight temperatures, and freezing levels well above 3300 m. For various reasons (injuries, illness) our team had lost half its members, and we were not even convinced we would make it to the hut…

 

So with low enthusiasm we met at 2:20 am Friday morning, and started skiing the trail up to Sherbrooke lake at 4:45 am. We were pleasantly surprised to see it was below zero, and a widespread refreeze occurred. We made our way towards the Scott-Duncan hut, finding a bare frozen Sherbrooke lake, a sporty waterfall to climb, and some clear indicators oft he heat with recent avalanches. It took us just under 8 hours to reach the hut. We napped, and set alarms for 4am hoping for another bluebird and refreeze. At 4am we were treated to half the sky dancing with an Aurora, and -4C! we left the hut at 5am, crossed the glacier and reached the Balfour shoulder. From there we bootpacked down to the the Balfour glacier. We skied a further ~300m and brought our skis back up to the ridge. We left the skis and walked the rest of the ridge. The was one exposed-feeling little arete, but overall made for pleasant travel. We staid closer to the west side of the ridge to avoid the cornice hanging over the east face, including a few detours on the west face. We finally summitted at 9:30, the refreeze starting to weaken. Within ~1:15 we were back at the shoulder, and the technical part of our day was done. We quickly skied back tot eh hut, in a sub 7-hr hut-to-hut push. In the meantime the weather moved in, and we were treated to wind and snow int he afternoon / evening.

 

We woke up to whiteout conditions and 10cm of fresh snow. By the time we were on the glacier, visibility cleared and had good visibility form there on. Mostly good travel on a weaker snowpack, We bypassed the waterfall which had a lot of meltout, and were able to skin across the lake. Scott and I punched through the ice within 15 ft of the shore. We snacked, dried out liners a bit, and tackled the end of the exit which provided quality skiing in the last 3 km.

 

Overall a great trip that turned out a lot better than we hoped!