Mt Hector ski mountaineering 2006
3394 meters high, 1600m gain, 9 hours car-to-car
March 17, 2006

The forecasts were calling blue skies, the snowpack had stabilised sufficiently, the decision to go was quickly made the afternoon before. Of course the weather was not as stellar as we hoped, but such is life in the Rockies. Despite very low visibility which made our progress slow at times, we made the summit and ended up sharing it with a couple of other guys! Not exactly the best view from the summit (see picture below)... but skiing down was a blast - after we escaped the upper cloud we could see enough to know where to go and the snow was great.

We kept to the guidebook instructions which specify to keep your line of ascent to the right of the glacier/peak, but had to negotiate a couple of big crevasses - the other party we saw took a line to the left/center which appeared cleaner and definitely faster. Definitely bring crampons and an ice axe - the final scramble to the summit would be sketchy without them in most conditions.

Summitpost beta on the route from Dow.

  Little Hector - we ski around it. skiing up Hector Creek interesting ice to climb  

  ice! skiing up really hard crust  

  tricky! looking back close-up of the ice  

  this is the small waterfall we bypassed skinning up above the small waterfall, photo by Dow Williams skinning up steep snow  

  above the crux already, making good time  

  this will be fun on the way down!  

  the clouds... minutes before they engulfed us skinning up with Little Hector on the right Hmm, we're supposed to see our objective from here!  

  nice view (not) ascending Mt Hector's glacier skiing on the glacier  

  skiing on the glacier some big crevasse where do we go from here?  

  Mt Hector's summit Mt Hector's summit in view for a few minutes! a couple of guys we shared the summit with, 40 meters from the top, photo by Dow Williams  

  at the col, 50 vertical meters under the summit Dow (left) and me on the summit of Mt Hector downclimbing the summit block with crampons and ice axe  

  myself on the way down, photo by Dow Williams pretending to be a good skier in some awesome powder, photo by Dow Williams skiing down was fast! photo by Dow Williams  

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