Snow, snow and more snow. Wow! Four of us crammed into John's van for the drive up. John had a few white knuckle moments I'm sure as we passed through the gap before Lac des Arc and the van was just about driven off the road by the wind. The Icefields Parkway had fresh snow and appeared to have only been ploughed the day before. This meant a rather slow drive in heavy snow conditions to the trailhead. We chose not to park in either the Mosquito Creek Hostel or campground parking lots as they had not been recently ploughed. Instead, parking occurred on the highway in front of a couple of cars that must have had people overnighting at the hostel.

The snow banks beside the road are some of the highest I have seen for this area. What if no one has skied up the creek? But as luck would have it there was a recently skied track. After the usual start of getting waxes sorted out so that people could climb the first hills, we stopped at the Mosquito Creek campground for our first lunch.

Mosquito creek snack stop

The ski track continued so it was followed for about another 2-3km. It ended at a creek drainage and then it became our turn to put a track up this drainage for a while. When it narrowed we skied out of it and continued to head up. After a while the trees did not seem to be diminishing, so our position was taken with map and GPS and the direction to go confirmed by compass. About 1/2 hr. later we emerged into the meadows. It had been snowing all day and the visibility was very limited. We continued up to try to find some defining ridges. As it turned out the Mosquito Lake drainage had been bypassed by us and our course was taking us towards the next drainage The ridge we expected to see wasn't there. So once again our position was determined and we set off up the ridge we needed to cross to get back to Mosquito Lake. Once this ridge crest was reached we were less than excited about losing the elevation to ski down to this little lake. An executive decision was made. We looked at the lake and said that's good enough and then three of the group decided they wanted to try some teleturns on a slope a little way up the ridge. The fourth person wanted to get their ski bindings and wax sorted out for the return trip, so they limped down to tree line to rectify the situation. A second lunch was had here at 2:20 pm.

High point in Molar meadows

Descending from Molar meadows

The skiout from the meadows was fabulous. The snow was unbelievable. We followed our up track and were down to the parking in quick order by 4:15. This was just as well as the driving conditions on the Icefields Parkway had further deteriorated and it allowed John to drive back to the TransCanada Hwy in daylight.

Driving back to Calgary was fairly slow with a vehicle altercation near Banff and a lot of traffic heading back to Calgary. One thing that really caught our eye just by Lake Louise was truck after truck (no cars) heading west towards the Kicking Horse Pass. We wondered if they had been held back while avalanche trigger work was being done in the Kicking Horse Canyon.

Thanks to David, John, and Terry for participating. A special thanks to John for driving in some pretty difficult conditions. Bob C/S