Seward

March 22, 2013

Grant and Shaughn came over after work and we drove down to Tupper Lake in Shaughn's car with skis strapped to the roof. We checked into the Park Motel and met the rest of our expedition group; Dianne, Eric, and Rob. Eric and Rob did not have skis but were planning to hike in, while the rest of us skied into Ward Brook camp. The plan was to climb the main range on Saturday, and then climb Seymour on Sunday before skiing back out. This was an ACC trip led by Grant, and I was tagging along as a loosely designated co-leader, but really just in it for the fun of a winter camping trip.

March 23, 2013

At 05:00 alarms went off and we ate a quick breakfast in the motel room. Loaded up the cars and drove to Coreys Road. At one point we passed a snowplow turnaround and then the road was no longer plowed. We backed up, thinking that maybe we had passed the winter trailhead, but upon closer inspection realized that it must be further. Drove carefully on the snow another kilometer or so and found the trailhead, where there was one other vehicle. Eric and Rob took off shortly on snow shoes while the rest of us got our skis ready. We skied off down the road in pristine powder snow conditions and quickly caught up to the snowshoers. The rolling hills of the road even gave a couple short hills to get some turns in. In little time we reached the summer trailhead and we signed in. The ski from here became more interesting, but relatively flat. Skiing was much more interesting than walking this section, however the numerous running stream crossings were much more difficult to negotiate on skis. Nevertheless we arrived at Blueberry camp in about two hours and met three folks here who were still working on their morning coffee, prior to heading up towards Seward. They said that they had scouted a short bit up the mountain the day before, but the trail needed to be broken. Eric and Rob arrived a few minutes later and we agreed to move on to Ward camp, about a kilometer further. After passing the Seward turn off, we had to break trail all the way to the Ward lean-to, where we set up our camp. At this point we all changed to snowshoes and returned to the Seward junction and started climbing. We could see from the fresh tracks that the Blueberry team was ahead of us, and we followed in their well laid out track until we caught up to them. We were a faster group so we passed them and were responsible for the track setting for the rest of the ascent. For the most part we did a pretty good job, following the summer trail reasonably closely. This was not easy however, as the snow got very deep as we ascended and picking out the trail among the spruce traps sometimes resulted in some false ends where we backtracked and picked up the trail again. It was snowing lightly all day. This coupled with the loads of snow which dumped off of every tree bough, meant we were all quite wet in a couple of hours. Fortunately it was not too cold so we pushed on. Eventually, after some wallowing in some really deep snow we gained the summit plateau. The map shows the true summit about 200 meters on the far side of this so we tried to find it in the fog and blowing snow. The trail was nowhere to be found under the 4+ feet of snow up here, yet spruce traps were a-plenty. We wandered around up here in quite a few different paths, but never found the summit marker. Assuming it was buried in the snow on the trees anyway, we declared victory on the mountain and began our descent. It was easily decided that Donaldson and Emmons were not going to happen today. The Blueberry group arrived, and we apologized for the spiderweb of trails up here. They had a GPS and it showed the summit a few hundred feet away in an area we had already explored. Since we were pretty cold at this point we wished them luck and began our descent. After dropping some elevation we stopped for a short lunch break. The emphasis was on short, since the cold quickly pierced our wet bodies and we got moving again. Arrived back at camp after a 10 hour day. Built a fire in the pit by the lean-to to warm up and dry off. Hit the sack early after a long supper and melting a lot of snow for water. Despite passing loads of running creeks on the way in, all the nearby streams were unfortunately dry.

Dianne, skiing along in the early morning light.

Signing in at the summer trailhead. The extra five km in winter was easy on skis.

Easy back country skiing lies ahead.

Self portrait.

Setting up at Ward Camp.

Beginning the ascent up Seward.

What we are calling Seward summit this trip.

Keeling warm around the fire in the evening.

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