After a night of sabering champagne and hanging out in a -25’c vodka tasting room it seemed like a great idea to go on a 20 mile ski tour and take down Fissile (pictured below on the left).
Rewinding a little bit, a few days earlier I had connected with a friend of a friend who wanted to go get after it. Fissile was on his tick list, I had already hit, but none of the other guys had so we opted for a guide. His usual guide was busy so we went out with Guillaume of Coast Mountain Guides. In all the run around trying to find a guide, my buddies bailed but Eric was still game and Guillaume had another client interested. So all-in-all three clients and surprisingly three guides! Guillaume had two guides in training in two. One of which was a splitboarder! (In the skiing off season he’s a multi-time North American rally champion.)
We met at a coffee shop in the Village at 8 am (felt like an alpine start after all our drinking the night before). Once the paperwork was sorted we headed up to the top of Whistler via Fitzsimmons then Garbanzo then Emerald then Peak.) We then skied off the peak to Symphony and up Symphony chair. Lots of chairs!
At the Symphony gate we headed out the “Musical Bumps”. To conserve time we skied the descents with our skins on and then contoured around Cowboy Ridge instead of skiing it.
To get up Fissile we attacked it from the south side. Toured as high as we could then booted up. I’m glad Guillaume supplied us with ice axes (I hadn’t brought mine to Whistler). Made the ascent less sketchy. And it was certainly less sketchy then when I booted up with Forest. That time there was no snow and it was a scree field. We got to the top of the NW face around 1:30.
We didn’t drop in directly from the top, dropped in a little lower. Snow was a little wind affected. Not super amazing powder but got better as we ripped down it.
To get back to the resort there are two options. Either back up Musical Bumps and down the Burnt Stew trail or out the Singing Pass. We opted for the Singing Pass (note: only an option if the split boarders with you are goofy). The Singing Pass takes forever! And the splitboarder with us ended up busting a binding and a pole so it took a little longer. We ended up skiing out with our headlamps on. Which ended up being cool. We got to rip down groomers into the village in the dark :).