Joe and Heidi White: We should probably blog....

Did you know that Heidi and I have had an active website for 9 years? We've posted just under 1000 times in our digital living room...thanks for joining us!

Our brother Jameson said that we should probably blog again since he's tired of seeing the same post since January. He's right....time to dust off the blog and remove the cobwebs.

How about an adventure story?

DB and I decided that since it's turning to spring, a couple days of spring mountaineering would be fun. So we got into mom's van (it's the name of our new van....but that's another story) and found the trail head to Garibaldi Lake.

The pace upward was slow....

with heavy packs full of climbing gear, food, water, and camping equipment

and 5000 feet of vertical gain...we were in for a long walk through the woods to get into the alpine.

We walked through BEAUTIFUL forests full of interesting moss. I'm told that this type of moss grows something like a millimetre a year!

Garibaldi Lake was amazing. It's a HUGE lake that's totally still frozen over and surrounded by lots of sweet mountains to climb.

We found a hut!...helpful, since the weather turned bad...and we had a place to wait it out.

The weather improved though and we picked our objective for the next day. It's named The Black Tusk...it's one of the most striking and recognizable feature around Vancouver. We went for a hike without packs to better scope our our line and observe snow conditions.

While it looks pretty....conditions were not in our favour. South faces were baking in the sun and showing evidence of pinwheeling (often precursors of wet slab avalanche activity), north faces were all severely wind loaded and corniced and every route we observed passed through complex terrain that could avalanche (and would at some point) given the conditions.

So we turned home.

The mountain will always be there for another day.