White Pass... Yukon Skiing!

As any with most good plan that we came up with, we didn't follow the plan of stopping at Cassiar Mountain where there is suppose to have good skiing. The mountain barely had snow on them, so we kept driving north. We reached Whitehorse in the afternoon, spending some time in the library looking for something to ski around... driving more would mean losing another day of skiing on the road!


According to a search on telemarktips.com most of the good skiing in Yukon is concentrated around White Pass (just by the Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site). There is a pyramid shaped peak just West of the pass called Feather Peak.


Reaching the summit is just a matter of a quick skin up (about 1100m from car to summit) that ends up by bootpacking. The snow was wind affected so the bootpack wasn't a big deal (red = hike up, green = ski)!


We skied down the top east side of the peak before cutting toward the backside which still had some good snow on it!


We spent our second day at White Pass on Log Cabin Mountain... a short skiing (about 850m) day before leaving for Valdez! On our way up we found a lot of icy spots, but fortunately we found some terrain features that were holding about 10cm of snow all the way to the bottom...


Summing it all, White Pass has some weirdly shaped mountains, mostly alpine terrain and is located in a windy corridor. But for whom is willing to search a little bit, good snow can stays trapped in terrain features for quite some time. We even saw some interesting couloirs on our way out...

Now leaving Yukon for Alaska, stay tuned!! :-)

Alexis