
A few days after we got back from our rock climbing course, we repacked and headed farther north to the backcountry of Whistler for an eight day mountaineering course. We had to pack food for eight days, along with crampons, ice axes, harnesses and helmets. Our packs weighed close to 50 pounds as we trekked across the mountains.






At some points we had to climb down into the crevasses and back up the other side.

This is the bottom of the glacier that we crossed. You can kind of see the lake, in the middle left of this picture, its where our tents were set up for camp for 3 nights before we started our traverse.
Heading up the top portion of the glacier. We had to be roped in because of the crevasses we just crossed and it got really steep ahead of us, where you can kind of see the other group.
Some gourmet backcountry cooking!




And I can't figure out how to get rid of this second picture.
We just summited this mountain earlier that day. We climbed along the bottom edge of that snow slab to get up to the ridge. It wasn't quite as steep as this picture makes it look, but it was definetly steep! I got a bit nervous going up, but mostly because I was thinking of how we would get back down. Below the snow is all scree slope so we pretty much just skied back down in our boots. It wasn't too bad and it was really sweet to be up at the summit. Its just over 8,000 feet.
This was a sunrise from our camp.


On our traverse, there were so many slopes that we had to cross like this. They were super steep and all loose boulders. It was pretty rough going, especially with a huge heavy back. Our knees and ankles were getting pretty beat up by the end of the trip. Ibuprofen and Tylenol were part of our breakfasts for the last few mornings.




